ABSTRACT

In this talk, I will start with providing an overview of Planet Labs, our founding mission, and a summary of what Planet has built to-date to serve the Earth Observation/Geospatial community. In the second part of the talk, I will focus on Planet pioneered "Agile Aerospace" philosophy to build and operate a large constellation of satellites to serve our customers with multiple TB of data from space. In the last part of the talk, I will give a preview of our upcoming missions.

BIO

Dr. Kiruthika Devaraj is a VP of Engineering at Planet Labs PBC. She leads the spacecraft design groups to design Planet's satellites. Planet builds and operates the world's largest constellation of remote sensing satellites to image the Earth on a daily basis and make change visible, accessible, and actionable. A recent notable project includes the architecture and development of Planet's high speed downlink radio and antenna that achieved 1.7 Gbps data throughput from a 3U form-factor CubeSat. Prior to Planet, Kiruthika was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Kavli Institute of Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) at Stanford University where she built microwave and millimeter-wave instruments to study star formation processes. One of the instruments she built, Argus, a 16-pixel W-band focal plane array, is commissioned at the Green Bank Telescope. She has a M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. At Georgia Tech, she worked on the NASA mission Juno, building a laboratory analog of Jupiter's atmosphere and studying the microwave properties of gases in the Jovian atmosphere.