The scheduled launch of the Philippines’ Maya-3 and Maya-4 cube satellites to the International Space Station (ISS) has been postponed, the the Space Technology and Applications Mastery, Innovation, and Advancement (STAMINA4Space) said.
The first Philippine university-built satellites were among the cargos aboard SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket’s Dragon C208, which was supposed to leave Earth at 3:37 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 28 (Philippine time), the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) said.
“s of Aug. 28, 2021, 3:37 p.m.: launch has been delayed due to bad weather,” STAMINA4Space said in a Facebook post. “Nonetheless, we are looking forward to the new schedule set tomorrow, Aug. 29, Sunday at 3:14 p.m. PST (Philippine Standard Time).”
In separate tweets, the National Aeronautics and Space and Administrations (NASA) and the SpaceX said that the launch has been postponed “due to weather.”
LAUNCH UPDATE: Due to weather, today’s @SpaceX cargo mission is postponed. Details for the next attempt: Date – Sun. Aug., 29 NASA TV coverage – 2:45am ET (06:45 UT) Target liftoff – 3:14am ET (07:14 UT) pic.twitter.com/phPLQ8YQaM
— NASA (@NASA) August 28, 2021
Standing down from today’s launch due to weather; next launch opportunity is Sunday, August 29 at 3:14 a.m. ET
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 28, 2021
According to the STAMINA4Space, among the missions of the two cubesats include technology demonstration, as well as image and video capture.
The cube satellites were designed and developed by the first batch of scholars under the STAMINA4Space Program: Project 3 – Space Science and Technology Proliferation through University Partnerships (STeP-UP).
The STAMINA4Space Program’s STeP-UP Project is a graduate program with a nano-satellite engineering track housed within the University of the Philippines-Diliman (UP) Electrical and Electronics Engineering Institute.
The project, which is funded and supported by the DOST with scholarship grants from its Science Education Institute (SEI), is implemented by the UP Diliman in collaboration with the Kyushu Institute of Technology in Japan.