It was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on 28 October 2011 atop a Delta II rocket.

M-Cubed was launched as a secondary payload to the Suomi NPP satellite, along with AubieSat-1, DICE-1, DICE-2, Explorer-1 Prime and RAX-2.

[2] M-Cubed, short for Michigan Multipurpose Minisat, was designed as a technology demonstrator for a new FPGA-based image processing system intended for a future NASA mission, Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE), recommended by the Earth Science Decadal Survey.

On-board control is provided by a Taskit Stamp9G20 microcontroller running Real time Linux.

[2] Following the launch, MXL was unable to command M-Cubed and observed anomalies in its transmitted data.