Maya-3 and Maya-4, PHL’s own CubeSats, to be launched off to International Space Station

The Philippines has made yet another historic mark in the field of space exploration!

Maya-3 and Maya-4, the country’s own cube satellites or CubeSats, are set to be launched off to the International Space Station this Saturday afternoon.

READ: Maya-2, Philippines’ 2nd CubeSat, has been launched to space station!

According to Space Technology and Applications Mastery, Innovation, and Advancement (STAMINA4Space) Program’s announcement on Facebook, Friday, the two CubeSats are set to leave Earth aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in a Dragon C208 cargo as part of the SpaceX Commercial Resupply Mission.

The two satellites’ mission, as mentioned in STAMINA4Space’s website, is to demonstrate image and video capture of the RGB camera using a 5MP commercial-off-the-shelf RGB camera as well as demonstrate ground data acquisition using Store and Forward capability of the CubeSat which will allow collection of data from remote ground sensors such as temperature, humidity and wind speed, among many other tasks.

Maya-3 and Maya-4 are the first Philippine university-built satellites designed and developed by the first batch of scholars under the STAMINA4Space Program: Project 3 - Space Science and Technology Proliferation through University Partnerships (STeP-UP).

It is under the support of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST), DOST-Science Education Institute (DOST-SEI), Kyushu Institute of Technology, and the Philippine Space Agency.

To watch the launch live, simply visit National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s website. – Kaela Malig/RC, GMA News