Editor's note: This edition of U.S. Navy History and Week in Review contains tidbits from the past two weeks. Happy New Year!
Top U.S. Navy Photos of 2014 — Take a look at the Navy’s most popular Facebook and Instagram photos of 2014; from deployments to homecomings to selfies, 2014 had it all.
Top U.S. Navy Videos of 2014 — Watch history being made and more — the Navy’s top YouTube videos for 2014 are sheer excitement!
Fire at Will for New Year’s Day —The Navy has the watch, New Year’s Day and every other day of the year.
USS Shadwell: The Greatest Ship Never Known — All Hands Magazine profiles the USS Shadwell (LSD-15), a World War II era ship which was saved from sinking by her valiant crew and has gone on to serve as a research vessel for the Naval Research Laboratory — and in doing so, has saved the lives of “countless Sailors.”
Navy Prepares for Jan. 20 Communications Satellite Launch — Navy military and civilian engineers are preparing the latest military communications satellite for a planned Jan. 20 launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. The satellite is part of MUOS, or Mobile User Objective System, which operates like a smartphone network from space, vastly improving secure satellite communications for mobile U.S. forces. Unlike its predecessor system, MUOS provides users a global, on-demand, beyond-line-of-sight capability to transmit and receive high-quality voice and mission data from a high-speed Internet Protocol-based system.
USS Sampson Contributes to AirAsia Search Efforts — USS Sampson (DDG 102) is supporting the ongoing Indonesian-led search and recovery operations for the downed AirAsia flight QZ8501 and assisted in locating the crash debris field yesterday. At the request of the Indonesian government, Sampson arrived on station in the Java Sea in the early afternoon on Dec. 30 and began assisting in the search.
Naval Health Research Center Concludes Six-year Vaccine Study With FDA — The Naval Health Research Center (NHRC) recently concluded one of the largest vaccine safety studies in the command's history, contributing to the fourth and final phase of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) smallpox vaccine safety trials. For more than six years, NHRC led the six military facilities across the nation taking part in this effort. About 16,000 samples were collected when the FDA decided NHRC's team had enough data to support the study.
"Iron Nickel" Returns to San Diego for Final Time — USS Peleliu (LHA 5) returned to Naval Base San Diego Dec. 24 from a six-month deployment to the Western Pacific. Upon return, the ship will make preparations to decommission in March after 34 years of service, 17 deployments and more than a million miles transited, and as the last remaining Tarawa-class amphibious assault ship.
MQ-8C Fire Scout completes first ship-based test period — The Navy’s new, larger MQ-8C Fire Scout unmanned helicopter returned from a five-day test period aboard USS Jason Dunham (DDG 109) Dec. 19 after successfully completing its first ship-based flights off the Virginia coast. The Fire Scout test team and Sailors aboard Dunham conducted dynamic interface testing with the MQ-8C to verify the system’s launch and recovery procedures before the system undergoes operational test next year.
Navy Plans for Android and iOS Devices — Currently, the Navy's 28,000 smartphone users are limited to using older BlackBerry devices, but that will begin to change this month and continuing through Dec. 2015. The Navy Enterprise Networks (NEN) Program Office is making progress on plans to transition to more modern mobile devices. Installation of mobile device management software from Good Technology, now underway, will provide NEN users the ability to check their email, access Navy web portals, use instant messaging, and access other NEN resources securely from both iOS and Android devices.
These stories originally published by Navy News Service during Dec. 22, 2014 – Jan. 2, 2015. For more Navy news, go to: www.navy.mil/.