Sinergise, a Planet Unit, Wins ESA Contract for Slovenian Resilience Node

Planet Labs GmbH announced on October 13, 2026, that Planet’s subsidiary Sinergise Solutions d.o.o. has been selected by the European Space Agency to build the Slovenia Space Resilience Node, a 12-month pilot project that will automate the link between wide-area satellite change detection and high-resolution imaging tasking for the country’s Administration for Civil Protection and Disaster Relief within the Ministry of Defence.

The project runs under Element 2 of ESA’s European Resilience from Space Earth Observation program, in partnership with Slovenian software development company Lucis d.o.o. According to Planet, the node will autonomously analyze open Copernicus data and PlanetScope imagery, and when pre-set thresholds or anomalies are detected it will alert and trigger a high-resolution tasking request, including through Planet’s Pelican fleet. Processed imagery will populate directly into the emergency responder’s map view within hours, providing rapid situational awareness for active crisis management, the company said.

“This contract reflects the strength of our long-standing collaboration with ESA and our shared commitment to translating Earth observation into operational, real-world impact,” said Diego Vanelli, Director of Government Sales in EMEA at Planet. “By combining open data infrastructure with high-frequency commercial imagery and tasking capabilities, we are creating a seamless, automated loop that bridges the gap between orbit and intervention. Slovenia serves as an ideal pilot, and the architecture we are building is inherently scalable as a blueprint for civil agencies across Europe.”

The pilot will initially demonstrate tip-and-cue workflows for wildfire management across Slovenia’s 20,000 square kilometers, and Planet said the architecture can be adapted to track floods, landslides and other environmental hazards.

How the Space Resilience Node Works

Writing on Planet’s Planet Pulse blog, Dino Horvat described the design as a classic tip and cue closed into a single automated loop. In the tip step, the Space Resilience Node will continuously and autonomously analyze satellite time series over user-defined areas and automatically dispatch an alert when a user-set threshold is crossed. In the cue step, that same alert will automatically issue a high-priority tasking request across several commercial very-high-resolution providers, Planet’s high-resolution fleet among them, choosing the imagery that best suits the event so the order goes out the moment the threshold is crossed, without anyone having to place it by hand. The imagery will come back processed and appear in the responder’s map view.

Planet describes combining monitoring and tasking in one loop as the project’s novelty, stating that the two are usually separate steps with a person in between and that the handover is where crucial hours in the response chain get lost. Wiring them into one loop will shorten the delay and remove the need for an Earth observation specialist to be on duty and available at the moment a disaster begins, the company said.

Horvat traced the pilot’s rationale to July 2022, when the Karst region on the Slovenian-Italian border saw the largest wildfire in Slovenian history, burning across around 3,500 hectares over more than two weeks. More than a thousand firefighters were on the ground each day and villages evacuated as the front advanced, and both the EU Civil Protection Mechanism and the Copernicus Emergency Management Service were activated. Planet said its near-daily PlanetScope constellation and Sentinel-2 satellites showed the fire nearly tripled in extent across three days. According to the company, very-high-resolution commercial imagery was available during that fire, and the bottleneck was getting it to the people making decisions in the field, because ordering commercial imagery traditionally meant navigating provider contracts, approvals and unfamiliar ordering tools, a process slow even for an experienced GIS expert.

European Resilience From Space

The pilot sits within a wider ESA initiative. Agency Director General Josef Aschbacher presented the European Resilience from Space programme at a conference in Brussels on October 28, 2025, as a new optional programme that would be open for subscriptions from Member States at ESA’s Ministerial Council in Bremen on November 26 and 27, 2025, according to the European Space Agency. ESA said the proposed system would integrate remote sensing, connectivity, positioning, navigation and timing, spectrum monitoring and Internet of Things systems, with the aim of providing users with the most secure, agile and rapid response capabilities possible. ESA described the programme as the first programmatic pillar supporting the European Union’s future Earth Observation Governmental Service, which is aimed at providing highly reactive, dual-use, independent space-based Earth observation capabilities.

“We still remain too fragmented to guarantee Europe with genuine, comprehensive and autonomous space resilience,” Aschbacher said at the event. “We have an opportunity to change that, and we must.”

According to Planet’s blog, the Slovenian node’s user interface will be open and its interfaces standards-aligned so that other national nodes can adopt them rather than rebuild them, with open source offering a practical route to increased interoperability between national nodes. The company said the design is not exclusive to wildfires or Slovenia, and that the same setup of continuous monitoring, detection, automatic tasking and delivery into an operational tool can be applied to other emergencies or used for disaster risk mitigation and post-event recovery. The Reference Framework that will connect national Space Resilience Nodes to one another is being defined in parallel, also under Element 2 of the programme, and the work is funded by ESA, Planet stated.

Planet, through Sinergise Solutions, has worked in collaboration with ESA for more than a decade, contributing to both Copernicus and the Third Party Missions programme. On January 26, 2026, Planet announced an enterprise-scale agreement with the Surveying and Mapping Authority of the Republic of Slovenia under which the country’s civil public administration will gain access to Planet’s high-cadence PlanetScope imagery and GURS will have access to high-resolution tasking services, with the data serving systematic monitoring of Slovenia’s forest cover and agricultural health, tracking for urban and infrastructure planning, and rapid detection and response for natural disasters, specifically wildfires, droughts and flooding events. Planet’s history in Slovenia dates to 2023, following its acquisition of Sinergise, and its Ljubljana office serves as one of the core hubs of its European operations. The Ljubljana-based team will build the resilience platform with Lucis over the next twelve months, according to the company.