Episode Summary 

This week’s episode features a conversation with Deanna Farago on how Planet Labs manages efficient commissioning and nominal operations for its constellation of over 200 satellites. Planet Labs was founded in 2010 with a goal to collect high resolution imagery of the entire earth every day. Today, Planet’s dataset includes, on average, 1700 images of every place on Earth. This has provided researchers, business, and governments with significant insight into our Earth.  

In this episode we dive into how Planet Labs balances commissioning new satellites while continuing to operate existing ones, the tools and automated features enable their constellation to run seamlessly, what aspects of constellation management are not as well known as they should be, and finally what we can learn from reflecting on a decade of operations. 

Deanna Farago is the Director of Mission Operations at Planet. Her team is responsible for commissioning and operating the largest Earth-observation constellation of satellites in the world. With an expertise in operations-at-scale, Deanna has written papers and presented at conferences such as Small Satellite, Grace Hopper, and the SpaceOps Conference. Prior to coming to Planet in 2014, Deanna worked as a Simulation Engineer at NASA Ames Research Center performing human-in-the-loop experiments in the Vertical Motion Simulator (VMS). She also worked as the Mission Assurance Manager on the ASTRA project at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory which helped to advance Mars surface instruments using a high-altitude balloon test environment. 

Timestamps

0:00 - Episode intro

2:39 - Deanna's background 

14:00 - Pelican 1 Tech Demo status

19:20 - Commissioning process for Dove fleets

25:28 - Queueing satellite commissioning

28:32 - Megahealth app - contacting satellites post deployment 

32:48 - Aside on TLEs and operational experience

39:44 - Looking back on growth over the years

45:50 - Things to consider about operating constellations

50:28 - Episode Outro & other applications 

Links 

• Planet Labs website: https://www.planet.com/ 

• Commissioning the World’s Largest Satellite Constellation (SmallSat 2017):  https://s3vi.ndc.nasa.gov/ssri-kb/static/resources/Commissioning%20the%20World_s%20Largest%20Satellite%20Constellation.pdf 
• Automated fleet commissioning workflows at Planet (SmallSat 2021): https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5088&context=smallsat 
• Autonomous Monitoring of a Diverse Ground Station Network (SmallSat 21) https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4983&context=smallsat