The Aerospace Corporation

A 6U CubeSat trained and ran a thermal-infrared segmentation model onboard in low Earth orbit, then fed the model's output into the attitude determination and control system to point at the Moon in closed loop from a live thermal image stream. Training ran on the GPU of an NVIDIA Jetson TX2 NX for about 13 minutes across 30 plus 30 epochs and reached a final mIoU above 0.9; the two tracking experiments on January 26 and 30, 2026 brought mean pointing error down to 7.4 and 13.5 pixels, while earlier runs oscillated visibly.

A 6U CubeSat trained and ran a thermal-infrared segmentation model onboard in low Earth orbit, then fed the model's output into the attitude determination and control system to point at the Moon in closed loop from a live thermal image stream. Training ran on the GPU of an NVIDIA Jetson TX2 NX for about 13 minutes across 30 plus 30 epochs and reached a final mIoU above 0.9; the two tracking experiments on January 26 and 30, 2026 brought mean pointing error down to 7.4 and 13.5 pixels, while earlier runs oscillated visibly.