(Photo grabbed from STAMINA4SPACE Facebook page)
MANILA – The country’s Maya-5 and Maya-6 cube satellites (cubesats) will be launched to the International Space Station this weekend, the Philippine Space Agency (PhilSA) shared on its Facebook page Friday.
The launch is scheduled on June 4 at 12:34 a.m. (PST) or June 3 at 2:34 p.m. (EDT), aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9.
Both cubesats were developed under the STAMINA4Space (Space Technology and Applications Mastery, Innovation and Advancement) Program through the support of the Department of Science and Technology, UP Diliman, PhilSA, and Kyushu Institute of Technology of Japan.
According to the STAMINA4Space website, Maya-5 has the same mission payload with Maya-2; while Maya-6 has the experimental on-board computer mission payload that controls the attitude determination and control system and hentenna mission.
Launched to space in 2021, the Maya-2 had experimental payloads, such as different antenna design and other materials used for the solar panels of a cubesat.
The website added that both Maya-5 and 6 will capture images of the earth, and have an on-board image processor that uses machine learning to classify these images.
These cubesats also have an amateur radio communication system which can receive packets.
Additionally, they carry the store and forward mission, which collects data from specific distributed sensors across remote locations on earth.
Meanwhile, the public is invited to watch the launch through the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s live feed.
