NASA will soon be sending a satellite built entirely by University of Cincinnati students into orbit. Project Leopard's LeopardSat-1 cube satellite is UC's first ever space mission and the state of Ohio's first student-led satellite.
"As of January 2026, just last Friday, LeopardSat-1 has officially been handed off to NASA and Voyager Technologies. Our satellite is no longer a prototype in a student lab. It's been integrated into the launch vehicle and is now manifested on NG 24," said UC CubeCats President Nathan Nguyen during a hand-off celebration, referring to Cygnus NG-24 (Northrop Grumman-24), a cargo resupply mission schedule to travel to the International Space Station this spring.
CubeCats is a UC student organization founded in 2015 to design, build and operate flight-ready spacecraft systems. In 2018, NASA accepted the group's Project Leopard into its CubeSat Launch Initiative.
Over the years, around 120 students created a roughly Rubik's Cube-sized satellite — 10cm x 10cm x 10cm — that will test if a thin carbon sheeting can block radiation effectively. That's important because if NASA wants to get to Mars, it needs a material that can protect astronauts from radiation during the long trip.
"We're trying to see how well this material will protect humans in space against all these different kinds of radiation," explains Sam Kohls, program manager of CubeCats, and a senior majoring in mechanical engineering technology. "There's a lot of different types, but what we're trying to do is, there is a radiation that typically is blocked by things like water and lead. Those materials are really heavy and hard to get to space. With our material, it's very, very light, so we hope we're able to take some of the weight from those materials and replace it with our lightweight material."
The students hope to gather four months of data once the International Space Station deploys the satellite. Once its mission is complete, the satellite will return to Earth's atmosphere, burning up upon reentry.
"It's incredible," Kohls says of the experience. "This is one of those things where if you told a younger version of me that by the time I graduated college I would have launched a satellite, there's no way I would have believed you. This is something that is so inspiring for everybody that's worked on it, and everybody who's looking at this, it means so much to so many people because it's so many firsts."
And, he adds, "It's kind of just plain fun."
You can see a replica of the LeopardSat-1 satellite on display at the Cincinnati Observatory
A handful of current and former CubeCats were in attendance for Wednesday's presentation. It was originally scheduled to take place in December at a hand-off ceremony to NASA, but was postponed twice because of snow storms.
Attendees on Wednesday also included organizations and companies that assisted the UC CubeCats throughout the process, such as Voice of America, the Cincinnati Observatory, Cincinnati Astronomical Society, Ohio Space Grant Consortium, L3Harris Technologies and more.
The students thanked those groups, and surprised them by creating a special opportunity. Participants can scan a QR code to have their names added to a list that will be part of the very first message sent to LeopardSat-1 once it comes online after being sent into orbit.
UC CubeCats aren't done. The student group is already working on its next satellite, HabSat-1, which will be used to study harmful algal blooms on the Great Lakes.
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