Sandia Lab News

Pilot program prepares future leaders

Thirty Sandia employees, working in departments ranging from engineering to security, recently finished a deep dive into leadership skills through the Future Leaders Pathway program. The seven-month pilot program provided an opportunity to build partnerships, identify personal strengths, and reflect about career goals and personal motivations.

UNM collaboration bolsters national security, science

Sandia and the University of New Mexico are joining forces to bolster national security and advance science and engineering under an agreement signed earlier this month. The umbrella Cooperative Research and Development Agreement allows the Labs and university to explore research collaborations among scientists, faculty and students in several areas, including ongoing projects.

Future hypersonics could be artificially intelligent

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.

B61-12 team reaches milestones in nuclear deterrence mission

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.

W80-4 Life Extension Program achieves major milestone

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.