Officials at Electronic Systems Center, Hanscom AFB, Mass., say they have replaced almost all 111 fixed-base weather sensing systems—the FMQ-19—at USAF installations around the world under a $60 million contract. These sensors, which reside at the end of runways, provide critical takeoff and landing weather data. The legacy systems being replaced required manual integration of data, but the new technology, says ESC’s Lt. Col. Andrew Terzakis, not only will provide “more accurate and reliable” data but have the potential to automatically integrate with other weather systems.
The Space Force on April 15 released two highly anticipated future-casting documents that describe what the service expects the space environment will look like in the year 2040 and lay out the force structure it thinks it will need to operate in that environment.