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FrontierSat is an atmospheric science and technology demonstration space mission in the form of a 3U CubeSat-type small satellite.^[1] The spacecraft was developed by “CalgaryToSpace”, a team of University of Calgary students.^{[2][3][4][5][6][7]} Its development was supported by University of Calgary, the Canadian Space Agency,^[8] and the European Space Agency‘s Fly Your Satellite! program.^[9][10] The satellite was launched on May 3, 2026 on the Falcon 9‘s CAS500-2 rideshare mission.^{[11][12][13][14][15][16]} Once in orbit, it successfully started transmitting beacon data.^[17]

FrontierSat carries two payloads.^[10] The Mini Plasma Imager (MPI), based on the Thermal Ion Imager (TII)^[18] instruments of ESA‘s Swarm mission, is designed to study the aurora-like STEVE phenomenon.^[19] The camera-monitored Deployable Composite Lattice Boom (DCLB) will test boom deployment technology.^{[8][20][21][22]}

The Mini Plasma Imager (MPI) flown on FrontierSat was developed at the University of Calgary. It is a charged-particle anemometer. Within the instrument, an electrostatic analyzer sorts incoming ions by their kinetic energy per unit charge. An IonCCD, a form of charge-coupled device, detects the ions. The instrument outputs 32 frames per second, generating a raw telemetry stream of approximately 5100 bytes per second.^[23]

• Aurora-D and Aurora-C – European space weather monitoring satellites