In this Making Leaders interview, we hear from Bhavi Jagatia, one of three recipients of SSPI’s Promise Award in 2023. Bhavi is an Astrodynamics Engineer at Planet, a position she took on after completing a successful internship for the Orbits R&D team. While at Planet, she has made significant improvements to the tasking system for the company’s high-resolution constellation of imaging satellites, SkySats. Bhavi was initially tasked with evaluating the complex schedule for SkySats, identifying areas of improvement and implementing changes to increase the collection capacity of the fleet. Her work resulted in substantial fulfillment enhancements, and she is now the sole owner and developer of the tool for her team. Bhavi received her Bachelors of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University, which she attended on the prestigious Tata scholarship. During her studies at Cornell, she worked with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) on a project to investigate the use of flux-pinning on orbiting sample capture for a Mars sample return mission. Bhavi served as avionics lead for the project and participated in a microgravity test aboard a Zero-G flight with the JPL team. She also led Cornell’s project team for NASA’s Micro-G NExT competition while completing her studies and worked in internships at Boeing’s research lab, ASML, and Honda Aircraft Company.

In addition to her success with SkySats, Bhavi has made several other major contributions to Planet since joining the team. Her team developed algorithms to schedule repeatable sunglint images as part of the mission design for Planet’s upcoming hyperspectral imaging satellite constellation. While considering various approaches to validate the tasking model, Bhavi proposed the novel idea of implementing their strategy on Planet’s currently in-orbit satellites as a proof-of-concept experiment. She quickly taught herself the basics of tasking on Dove satellites and wrote scripts to add a new high off-nadir imaging strategy. Bhavi was able to validate her colleagues’ scheduling model by capturing sunglint images on an end-of-life Dove satellite, and her work was published and presented at AIAA Scitech 2023 and IEEE Aerospace 2023, where it received the Best Paper award. Read more about Bhavi.