ORBIS 4.2.1 went to general availability on Tuesday. The release notes are in the documentation; this is the commentary.
What shipped: the unified tasking fabric for GRIDSCAN and TIDEWATCH, a rewritten co-registration stage that is 2.3× faster on multi-date stacks, per-cell uncertainty propagation through the change detection chain, and 41 fixes.
The co-registration rewrite is the one I am pleased about. The old implementation was the last significant piece of 2014-era code in the hot path and it had accumulated eight years of special cases. The new one is shorter, faster and — this is the part that took the time — produces bit-identical results on our full regression corpus, so historical deliveries remain reproducible.
What slipped: automated cloud shadow masking for the Sentinel-class sources, and the GeoParquet delivery option. Cloud shadow slipped because our validation showed it under-masking on low sun angles and we were not prepared to ship a masking step that quietly leaves shadow in. GeoParquet slipped because of a dependency version conflict that is our own fault and is now resolved; it lands in 4.3.
4.3 is scheduled for September, ahead of the Summit.