As we all know, 2020 was a disruptive, chaotic, and tumultuous year. Professionally though, it was a year that tested and demonstrated the capabilities and resiliency of Planet’s operations teams. Like the entire company, mission operations’s transition to fully remote was abrupt. Within the span of two weeks, business continuity plans were developed and all employees transitioned to a 100% work-from-home posture. Fortunately, the team was well suited for this, as we already operate with personnel in multiple geographic locations, routinely transfer ops authority across time zones, and work remotely on a regular cadence. Nevertheless, new norms have been created, “zoom fatigue” is real, and work/life balance can be blurry and hard to manage in our environment. But the team prevailed. In admiration of all of their hard work, we’re pulling back the curtain on our best-in-class Missions Ops team and sharing some highlights from the last year. Enjoy! Keeping the Lights On The Mission Operations team is responsible for all safe and stable space, ground, planning, and fulfillment operations. It’s imperative that their day-to-day operations be reliable and maintained, even throughout a global pandemic. Satellites still needed contacts, imagery still needed to be captured and downlinked to our customers, and collects still needed to be reviewed and approved. It’s in times of instability that all of the hard work this team has invested into our satellites, our ground stations, our pipeline, and infrastructure is demonstrated most. Go for Launch Before we can achieve any of these operations, we first have to get the satellites to orbit. The last 12 months tested the resiliency of our launch capabilities and planning. The year brought launch failures and delays that forced the team to improve our metrics and terminology, productivity, and efficiency of our systems to ensure customer expectations were managed and maintained until we could launch again. Fortunately, the space industry demonstrated resilience as well. We had a record five launches in 2020, all occurring within five months of each other. That’s one launch per month! Flock 4V was launched on a Vega rocket and was our largest SuperDove launch of 2020, sending 26 of our latest-generation satellites to orbit. This was also our first launch with a phased deployment campaign from two deployers. For our high-resolution mission, both SpaceX launches that delivered SkySat 16-21 to orbit were inserted into record-setting low altitudes (280km) for Planet and into inclined orbits for the first time.