Leopard

• 1. Introduction

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  LEOPARD is a nanosatellite no larger than a shoebox, and it carries an ambitious set of experiments built by students from 17 countries. Its full name is an acronym: Light intensity Experiment with On-orbit Positioning and satellite Ranging Demonstration. It fits inside a standard 3U CubeSat form factor, measuring 10cm by 10cm by 30cm. On the 26th of October 2025, it launched aboard a Japanese H3 rocket. From there it traveled to the International Space Station on board HTV-X1, before being released from the station's Kibo module on the 3rd of February 2026 at 08:20 UTC. What happens once a satellite that small is set loose in orbit? The answer is a series of experiments that test radiation protection, novel navigation, and cameras trained on a peculiar sliver of sky just after sunset.

• 2. Alloy Wings

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  Before LEOPARD could begin any of its science, it first had to unfold itself. The satellite deploys its solar panels using shape-memory alloy, a material that changes shape in response to heat, combined with a dedicated heating system. Engineers at Kyushu Institute of Technology and Nanyang Technological University chose shape-memory alloy over conventional springs specifically because it allows a thinner deployment mechanism. A traditional spring requires space to compress and release; the alloy approach removes that constraint. That thinner profile matters when the entire satellite is only 30 centimeters long.

• 3. Radiation Under the Microscope

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  Nanyang Technological University in Singapore designed the satellite's Single-Event Latch-up payload, known as SEL. Space radiation can strike the electronics aboard a spacecraft and cause them to malfunction in ways grouped under the term single-event effects. LEOPARD's approach to studying this is deliberately comparative. The SEL payload carries two microcontrollers that perform identical functions: one built from radiation-hardened microchips, the other from commercial off-the-shelf components. By running the same tasks on both in the same radiation environment, the experiment can measure exactly how much protection the hardened chips actually provide over ordinary hardware a designer might buy from any supplier.

• 4. Watching the Horizon Glow

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  The Multispectral Camera mission, called MSC, points in a specific direction: toward Earth's atmosphere at moments when the Sun is below the horizon. At that angle, sunlight scattering through the upper atmosphere produces what the mission describes as horizon glow. The MSC payload carries two cameras, one sensitive to visible red, green, and blue light, and one sensitive to near-infrared light. The goal is to observe two distinct scattering processes, Rayleigh scattering and aerosol scattering, simultaneously across different wavelengths. LEOPARD's attitude control system rotates the satellite to aim the cameras correctly during each observation window. The two-camera setup allows researchers to compare how particles of different sizes scatter light at wavelengths the human eye cannot see versus those it can.

• 5. Finding Position Without GPS

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  OPERA, short for Onboard Processing of Earth-origin one-way Radio ranging signal, is the mission that may carry the most practical weight for future spacecraft designers. The demonstration aims to determine the satellite's orbital position without relying on any global navigation satellite system, including GPS. A network of Earth-based parabolic antennas, each a few meters across and synchronized with one another, transmits signals to the satellite in the S band at a predetermined time. LEOPARD tracks both the time of arrival of each signal and the Doppler shift in the signals it receives. From the differences in relative time delay across signals from different antennas, OPERA's onboard processing estimates its own position in orbit, with an expected accuracy of a few kilometers. The entire OPERA device fits into just 0.5U of the satellite's 3U volume.