Augment Your Maritime Domain Awareness with Satellite Imagery from  Planet

Planet’s high temporal resolution imagery collection over strategically important ports and waterways has enabled novel approaches to Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA), which historically have been restrained by limited coverage, inefficient manual processes, and complexity fusing data.

Journalists have taken advantage of Planet’s maritime domain imagery in fascinating ways. Getting access to denied areas can be especially hard for western journalists, so access to commercial satellite imagery has enabled them to report on topics that, without satellite imagery, they would not be able to cover. Using high spatial resolution imagery from Planet’s SkySat constellation, ABC News in the U.S. published an article describing how Ukraine’s navy was successfully able to force Russian naval vessels out of the port in occupied Sevastopol, Crimea, to a port in Russia. The ABC journalists also spoke to an analyst who is an expert in tracking oil tankers in the Black Sea who said that Russian-affiliated oil tankers had also been taking measures to avoid “the looming security threat imposed by Ukraine.” Understanding strategic moves by all parties to a conflict is enabled by Planet imagery, which has proven indispensable in other ways, too.

For example, The New York Times fused Planet imagery with other data sources, including maritime data from Planet partner SynMax, to create a database of oil tankers that were found to be evading sanctions on Iranian oil. The Times journalists found that the tankers had transferred at least $2.8 billion in crude oil, evading U.S. sanctions and highlighting a gap in U.S. government oversight, the Times journalists wrote. They also explained how insurance companies often leverage satellite imagery to help them investigate alleged fraud and abuse, such as a deception tactic known as AIS spoofing.

(Click here to watch a webinar entitled “Using Electro-Optical Imagery and AI Analytics in the Maritime Domain” with Planet partner SynMax.)

Many other news organizations have relied on Planet data for their maritime investigations and reporting; these include: The Washington Post, Newsweek, Associated Press, CNN, Financial Times, The Guardian, The Hill, and others. Outside of traditional newsrooms, other organizations have also leveraged Planet data for their investigative analyses; these include: Bellingcat, The Center for Strategic and International Studies, 38 North, AllSource Analysis, C4ADS, RUSI, Windward, Royce Geo, and others.

There are many other MDA use cases for operationalizing Planet imagery that we haven’t highlighted in this post. These include: machine learning-powered vessel detection, Order of Battle reconnaissance, ports of interest monitoring, disaster detection (e.g., unreported oil spills), humanitarian response planning and monitoring, IUU (Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated) fishing detection, border and port security, and others.