Yim, with LEAP project, winner of Space Tech Challenge Award

This summer, assistant professor Justin Yim was one of the winners of the inaugural 2026 Aviation Week Space Tech Challenge Award.

He was awarded in the university programs category for his project “LEAP - Legged Exploration Across the Plume,” funded by the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program. The five categories are colonization, industrialization, protection and defense, commercialization, and university programs.

“I was honored to hear that the judges rated our project second highest across all five categories — a remarkable result for a university team competing alongside fielded commercial technologies!” said Yim.

Through LEAP, Yim has developed a multimodal jumping and rolling robot platform designed for planetary surface exploration — originally conceived to explore Saturn’s moon Enceladus, where gravity is just 1.2% of Earth’s. LEAP achieves its extraordinary range of motion through a single powerful jumping leg combined with two large, angled wheels that serve triple duty: as reaction wheels for attitude control during flight, as protective bumpers on impact and as rolling wheels for ground travel. A prototype tested at NASA Glenn Research Center has demonstrated jumps of 0.8 m (2.6 ft.) on Earth, translating to 5 m on the moon. The program is funded by NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts program and counts flight operations experts at NASA JPL and two NIAC Fellows among its team.

The Space Tech Challenge Awards program, launched this year at Aviation Week, recognizes groundbreaking innovations and provides winners and finalists with exposure to reach a broader market and gain visibility for their products and services.

The Space Tech Challenge aims to close the gap between innovations sitting in labs, garages, and university research centers, and the missions and programs that need them – to close the critical capability gaps in propulsion, manufacturing, life support, domain awareness, and the technologies that will let humans live and work beyond Earth.

Launched in late 2025, the program drew 50 submissions from startups, established primes, and university research teams spanning four continents and every corner of the space technology landscape. An eight-member evaluation team of independent industry experts scored each entry on how directly it addresses a real capability gap, how feasible and novel the solution is, and what evidence exists that the market recognizes the need.