THEY WORKED FROM HOME, TOO The eight-member team of scholars who developed Maya-3 and Maya-4 (on table), low-orbit satellites being launched into space via a SpaceX rocket on Sunday. —PHOTO FROMSTAMINA4SPACE
MANILA, Philippines — Two low-orbit satellites — the first to be developed entirely in a Philippine laboratory by Filipino engineers — are heading out to space today.
Maya-3 and Maya-4 will be hitching a ride on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket taking off from Kennedy Space Station in Florida at 3:14 p.m. on Sunday (Manila time). The launch was originally scheduled for Saturday but was reset due to Hurricane “Ida.”
They will be part of the rocket’s cargo of supplies for the International Space Station, from which the satellites will be released into orbit.
A livestream of the launch can be viewed online at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s YouTube page and on its website at nasa.gov/nasalive.
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Maya-3 and Maya-4 are cubesats—literally shaped like cubes measuring 10 centimeters by 10 cm by 11.5 cm—designed and developed by the first batch of scholars who studied under Space Science and Technology Proliferation through University Partnerships (STeP-UP), a partnership between the University of the Philippines (UP) and the Kyushu Institute of Technology in Japan.
STeP-UP is part of a larger initiative, the Space Technology and Applications Mastery, Innovation, and Advancement (STAMINA4Space) Program, funded by the Department of Science and Technology.
