UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Roshan Eapen, assistant professor of aerospace engineering at Penn State, has been selected as one of seven recipients nationwide of NASA's Early Career Faculty (ECF) 2025 Award, a competitive program that supports innovative research by outstanding early-career faculty members in science and engineering. The monetary awards are made for the previous year, meaning the most recent recipients are referred to as the 2025 cohort. Eapen will receive $677,267 over three years to support his project.
The NASA Early Career Faculty Award program, which is administered through NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate recognizes promising university researchers whose work aligns with NASA's strategic research and technology goals. The award supports faculty members as they advance innovative research while engaging students in projects that contribute to the future of aerospace science and exploration, according to NASA’s ECF website.
Eapen’s proposal — under the NASA topic area of using machine learning to enable spacecraft to make guidance, navigation and control decisions onboard — focuses on developing more autonomous and reliable spacecraft. The project, called HJ-PRISM, will use machine learning and physics-based models to create a “decision map” that could allow spacecraft to select efficient maneuvers, recognize unexpected conditions and adjust their behavior without waiting for instructions from Earth. The approach aims to combine the flexibility of machine learning with the reliability and interpretability of physics-based methods, helping make autonomous spacecraft decisions easier to understand and trust.
"A central goal is to combine the flexibility of machine learning with the reliability and interpretability of traditional physics-based methods," Eapen said. "Rather than asking a spacecraft to rely entirely on a ‘black box’ artificial intelligence system, we want its decisions to remain connected to the physical laws governing the vehicle. That connection could make autonomous decisions easier to understand, evaluate and ultimately trust."
In addition to Eapen, the 2025 cohort includes seven faculty members from institutions across the country working to address critical challenges in space technology and exploration.
"For me, the award is both humbling and encouraging," Eapen said. "I see it not simply as recognition of one proposal, but as an opportunity to establish a longer-term research program in trustworthy spacecraft autonomy at Penn State. I am especially excited that it will give students the opportunity to work at the intersection of mathematics, machine learning and future space exploration. The award will allow us to support graduate students, develop the underlying algorithms and software and move the concept from foundational mathematics toward a working proof of concept. We plan to test the framework in realistic spacecraft scenarios and eventually demonstrate it using embedded computing and hardware-in-the-loop experiments."
NASA is providing this funding under award number 80NSSC26K0697. This content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the views of the funders.