Bomb squad teams from coast to coast challenged their emergency preparedness skills during Sandia’s five-day Robot Rodeo and Capability Exercise last month. Twelve scenarios involving vehicles, simulated terrorist events and timed obstacles were set up from May 13-17 around Sandia and Kirtland Air Force Base for the military and civilian teams.
When traveling at five times the speed of sound or faster, the tiniest bit of turbulence is more than a bump in the road, said Katya Casper, the Sandia aerospace engineer who, for the first time, characterized the vibrational effect of the pressure field beneath one of these tiny hypersonic turbulent spots.
A test launch for a hypersonic weapon — a long-range missile that flies a mile per second and faster — takes weeks of planning, and it's uncertain how useful test systems will be against urgent, mobile or evolving threats. But Sandia's hypersonics developers think artificial intelligence and autonomy could slash these weeks to minutes for deployed systems.
Sandia’s B61-12 nuclear weapons team has accomplished several milestones, including the gravity bomb’s final design review and the first production completion of several components for the life extension program. Sandia and LANL presented the B61-12 design for final review to an independent peer-review panel of 12 military and civilian experts last fall.
Sandia software developers have created the first inverse-design software for optical metamaterials. The new software lets users design science-fiction-like materials with the same efficiency that architects use when they draft building plans.
The W80-4 Life Extension Program achieved a major milestone last month when the joint DOE and Department of Defense Nuclear Weapons Council approved the program to enter Phase 6.3, development engineering. The approval follows multiple briefings by the W80-4 leadership team to program stakeholders at NNSA headquarters and the Pentagon.
Modernizing the nuclear deterrent also means modernizing the weapon development process. To this end, Sandia and the Kansas City National Security Campus have established the New Product Introduction initiative. By integrating lessons learned from past weapons programs and industry best practices into the existing process, NPI can help enhance the security, reliability and performance of the nation’s nuclear deterrent.
The next generation of nuclear security experts is being trained in an exciting new way — by playing a first-of-its-kind war game Sandia helped design. The game, Signal, which goes online this spring after its launch as a board game last year, offers players a chance to make strategic decisions using modern political, economic and military tools.
To make algae biofuels more competitive with petroleum, growers must increase productivity and keep their ponds from crashing. That’s why Sandia and partners are inviting participants to help in the search for the toughest algae strains and most innovative farming techniques.
More than 700,000 Multiple Launch Rocket System submunitions have been demilitarized since the Army started using an automated, nine-robot system conceptualized, built and programmed by Sandia engineers.