The Aerospace Corporation is a Federally Funded Research Development Center dedicated to supporting the space enterprise and acts as an unbiased technical advisor to the government on complex problems. At a time when space is proliferating and technology is rapidly changing, The Aerospace Corporation is examining the role that machine learning can play in the space domain while still evaluating potential risks of automation in high-consequence environments.

Nick Zolman’s research at The Aerospace Corporation is focused on finding ways to incorporate extensive engineering and physics expertise into machine learning algorithms so that they can operate in the low-data limit. Examples of his work include building lithium-ion battery digital twin models to estimate battery health on-orbit and developing methods to extract low-dimensional representations of dynamics from high-dimensional scenes in the absence of ground truth state-measurements.