THE COUNTRY’S  first university-built cube satellites Maya-3 and Maya-4 were launched from the International Space Station on Wednesday, October 3.

They were developed under the Space Science and Technology Proliferation through University Partnerships Project of the STAMINA4Space Program in collaboration with the Kyushu Institute of Technology in Japan.

It was funded by the Department of Science and Technology and implemented by the University of the Philippines Diliman as well as the DOST Advanced Science and Technology Institute.

“The team is extremely excited now that Maya-3 and Maya-4 are orbiting Earth in space. This event marks a significant milestone in our country’s space science and technology initiatives,” STeP-UP Project Leader Prof. Paul Jason Co said.

The satellites will stay in low earth orbit, around 400 kilometers above the ground, circling the planet every one and a half hours.

Their mission is to collect data from remote ground sensors such as temperature, humidity, and wind speed.

“Sustainability can be ensured by making sure that the knowledge gained from this is shared with as many HEIs, as this ensures that there will be more people with the necessary knowledge to do the same,” Co said.

Maya-3 and Maya-4 were built by the first of two batches of STeP-UP scholars taking the nanosatellite development track under the Master of Science/Master of Engineering program of the UPD Electrical and Electronics Engineering Institute.