STAMINA4Space

The locally built Maya-3 and Maya-4 cube satellites (CubeSats) of the Philippine government were launched to the International Space Station on August 29 at 3:14 P.M. (PST) aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket’s Dragon C208 as part of SpaceX Commercial Resupply Mission-23 (SpX-23).

The Philippines marked another scientific milestone on Sunday, February 21, at exactly 1:36 in the morning, as the country’s second cube satellite (CubeSat) Maya-2 was launched to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard the S.S. Katherine Johnson Cynus spacecraft.

The nanosatellite was expected to stay in orbit for less than a year only, but it had stayed in orbit for about 2 years and 4 months.

In its two-year journey, the Diwata-2 microsatellite has captured 32,256 images, including a wide-field camera image of Typhoon Ambo on May 12, 2020, two days before it made landfall in the country when it was still a tropical storm.

The Philippine Scientific Earth Observation Microsatellite (PHL-Microsat) Program will now be called the Space Technology and Applications Mastery, Innovation and Advancement (STAMINA4Space) Program.