Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, June 6) — The country on Monday night launched two locally-built cube satellites (CubeStats) — Maya-5 and Maya-6 — to the International Space Station (ISS), the Philippine Space Agency (PhilSA) announced on Tuesday.
The two cubes, weighing approximately 1.15 kilograms each, boarded the SpaceX Falcon 9.
Maya-5 and Maya-6 are expected to move along an orbit at an altitude of approximately 400 kilometers once they are released into space, said PhilSA.
The agency said the satellites were launched to \”provide local opportunities to acquire space technology know-how and hands-on experience in satellite development.\”
\”It is also geared towards increased utilization of domestic capabilities by transitioning to locally available components, fabricated boards, and manufactured structural frames,\” the PhilSA said.
The CubeStats were built under the Space Science and Technology Proliferation through University Partnerships project of the STAMINA4Space Program, which is funded by the Department of Science and Technology.
Maya-5 and Maya-6 were developed by the students at the University of the Philippines Electrical and Electronics Engineering Institute as part of the nanosatellite engineering track.
\”The Maya-5 and Maya-6 CubeSats are a technology demonstration and educational platform developed for remote data collection through Store-and-Forward (S&F) Mechanism, similar to its predecessor from Kyutech’s 4th Joint Global Multi-Nation Birds Satellite (BIRDS-4) Project, Maya-2, which was decommissioned on 5 July 2022,\” said PhilSA.
