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Planet Labs' Open Satellite Feed
Planet Labs is a 15-year-old, San Francisco-based satellite manufacturer and constellation operator. They operate or have operated four different constellations throughout their history and capture imagery of the entire Earth's landmasses every day. As of this writing, LinkedIn lists the firm as having 1,751 associated members.
Their CEO, Will Marshall, is one of the firm's three co-founders. In February, he posted images alongside the Secretary General of NATO, Mark Rutte, French President Emmanuel Macron and Kaja Kallas, who was Estonia's Prime Minister between 2021 and 2024 and is now Vice-President of the European Commission.
Their latest Pelican-11 satellite, which will join their Tanager constellation, was deployed by SpaceX's Transporter 17 Mission on July 7th.
This is its release into Lower Low Earth Orbit (LLEO) over Greece.
As of this writing, Planet Labs' Ephemerides service lists 97 of their satellites that are still in orbit. These are their latest details from GCAT.
These are the spectrum response levels of their SuperDove and SkySat satellites compared alongside RapidEye, Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2.
The Hyperspectral Pelican constellation differs from their other constellations as its satellites capture 426 bands of light. I reviewed some of its free imagery last year.
Last year, Planet Labs announced a new Disaster Data feed. This is a Cloudflare-hosted, DuckDB & QGIS-friendly feed with select imagery they've captured from various natural and man-made disasters shortly after they've occurred. The metadata describing the images is shipped as Parquet and JSON files.
In this post, I'll analyse the imagery they've captured and published openly this year.
I'm using a 5.7 GHz AMD Ryzen 9 9950X CPU. It has 16 cores and 32 threads and 1.2 MB of L1, 16 MB of L2 and 64 MB of L3 cache. It has a liquid cooler attached and is housed in a spacious, full-sized Cooler Master HAF 700 computer case.