Turning Off the Lights: Automating SkySat Mission Operations

A common goal for satellite operations is to achieve a level of automation that minimizes human interaction, especially as constellation sizes increase. Planet’s SkySat fleet is a constellation of high resolution Earth imaging smallsats that has grown from three to fifteen satellites in three years. This rapid expansion, along with Planet’s goal of improving operational reliability, has necessitated automating operations to reduce manual effort to maintain the health and safety fleet. To address the growing amount of work required for anomaly triage, systems were created for automated anomaly response. These systems have removed the need to actively monitor satellite health and safety. Instead, operators rely on interrupt-driven alerts to inform them of an anomaly. With the goal of further decoupling fleet size from operator effort, the mission operations team is working to automate routine maintenance tasks. As a result, the number of person-hours needed to actively operate the fleet has seen a three-fold reduction per week while enabling a five-fold increase in on-orbit assets. The systems developed have enabled an operational posture that removes the need for 24/7 staffing at a dedicated operations center