Maya: learning with small spacecraft

Maya-1 joined the BIRDS-2 collaboration at Japan’s Kyushu Institute of Technology and deployed from the ISS in August 2018. Maya-2 continued the Japanese university partnership through BIRDS-4 and deployed in March 2021. Maya-3 and Maya-4 extended this experience into development in a Philippine university setting through STeP-UP, with Japanese university collaboration. That progression connects international experience with local training; it does not mean every spacecraft in the family had identical hardware or objectives.

The photograph shows the three BIRDS-2 spacecraft after release: Maya-1, BHUTAN-1 and UiTMSAT-1. Serena M. Auñón-Chancellor photographed the group above Earth. The image documents a deployment event, while project records establish each spacecraft’s identity and purpose. It should not be used as a picture of Maya-3 or of later hardware simply because the satellites share a family resemblance.

Maya-3 and Maya-4 used a bus with Maya-1 heritage and included imaging and radio demonstrations. Their store-and-forward concept collected data from remote sensors, retained it aboard the satellite and delivered it later to a receiving station. This is useful when a direct continuous connection is unavailable, but the storage step also makes timing and data identification important.

Consider an invented field sensor that measures temperature at 09:00 and uploads it on a later pass. If the satellite delivers the packet at 11:30, the observation still describes 09:00 conditions. A good record retains both measurement and delivery times. The same reasoning helps distinguish a delayed environmental reading from a real-time emergency message; different uses tolerate different delays.

Store the measurement time

Maya-3 and Maya-4 launched to the station in August 2021 and deployed in October. Their missions ended with reentry in August 2022. Maya-5 and Maya-6 followed as another university cohort; NASA’s station report records their deployment on July 19, 2023. Delivery as cargo, independent deployment, receipt of a beacon and successful payload operation are separate milestones.

A decoded beacon demonstrates one kind of radio contact and may report spacecraft health. It does not automatically prove that a camera experiment, sensor collection and every other objective succeeded. For a student project, useful outcomes can also include tested hardware, analyzed failures and transferable procedures. Evaluate those outcomes explicitly, while reserving claims about completed orbital experiments for the corresponding flight evidence.