The Planet Satellite Constellations: A Synergistic System Collecting Earth Data Insights
The commercial satellite imaging market is growing rapidly. It was valued at $3.27 billion in 2022 and is projected to reach $14.18 billion by 2030. In their Fourth Industrial Revolution series, the World Economic Forum suggested that Earth observation data will unlock major industries in the second half of this decade.
Beyond key sectors like agriculture, electricity, government, and mining, others including financial services and transportation will also rely on commercial satellite imagery to create economic and climate-related value now and in the future.
Agile Aerospace
As a pioneer of agile aerospace, we at Planet bring a unique approach to our satellite manufacturing. This philosophy, inspired by software companies’ approach to rapid iteration and continuous improvement to reduce costs and enhance capabilities.
This approach allows us to release new designs frequently, learn from operations in space, and adjust dynamically. We also use commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) parts instead of costly, custom components, enabling us to maintain a high-risk tolerance and low costs for all stakeholders.
Another advantage of Planet is our ability to combine multiple products and services into one integrated platform, Planet Insights Platform. Users can access the unique datastreams collected by diverse satellite constellations all from a single, easy-to-use Planet dashboard.
Advantages of Planet Satellite Constellations
Planet owns and operates the largest fleet of Earth imaging satellites in history, supporting three distinct constellations:
- PlanetScope®: Consisting of hundreds of Dove® and SuperDove satellites, our PlanetScope constellation supports our flagship monitoring product. As our smallest satellites, about the size of a shoebox, these satellites circle the Earth, providing a line scanner of the planet, capturing approximately 3 m resolution images of all of Earth’s landmass at a near-daily basis.
- SkySat® and Pelican™: Our SkySat constellation provides our high-resolution data on a traditional tasking model. These satellites are capable of capturing 50 cm imagery of a specific location on Earth multiple times per day, allowing our customers to analyze fleeting and time-sensitive events in great detail. We are currently launching our next-generation Pelican satellites, which will replace our SkySat fleet over time, and are designed to offer higher resolution, increased revisit rates, and faster data collection.
- Tanager™: We launched the first satellite of our newest constellation, Tanager, in August 2024. This satellite delivers hyperspectral data at 30 m resolution with more than 400 spectral bands. This new hyperspectral data can help customers reveal social, environmental, and climate insights in unprecedented detail. We look forward to creating our next Tanager satellite and were proud to build and launch our first Tanager satellite through a first-of-its-kind public-private partnership with the Carbon Mapper Coalition with the mission of pinpointing, quantifying, and tracking point-source methane and CO2 emissions.
We believe that the power of Planet satellite constellations lies in how they can work synergistically. For example, today, our customers are able to conduct Tip and Cue operations with our various data streams. Through our near-daily medium-resolution PlanetScope Monitoring data, users are able to detect subtle changes in forest landscape, military sites, or marine harbors. This can automatically trigger a cue for our SkySat tasking satellites to capture a high-resolution image of the site. Turning to our Tanager satellite, which can help reveal methane leaks with hyperspectral data, analysts can then use our Monitoring or Taking capabilities to gain a better understanding of infrastructure or landscape change around the leak.
Real-World Applications
Governments and businesses worldwide use Planet satellite imagery to optimize operations, drive growth, and achieve public benefits. Two significant examples are our collaborations with civil and national governments and global intelligence and defense organizations.
Land Monitoring and Civil Policy
Civil governments around the world make informed decisions that help reduce the impact of climate change. Notably, our Planet Insights Platform allows our customers to analyze datasets from our unique satellite constellations alongside publicly available satellite data, such as that of Sentinel-2. This complementary approach has enabled European governments in particular to use Planet data to monitor change and comply with growing sustainability and agriculture policies.
This capability helps governments:
- Reduce costs and accelerate responses
- Manage compliance and enforce permits at scale
- Adapt to dynamic policy requirements
Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance
The global intelligence community also relies on Planet for security assessments and responses. Our broad-area monitoring supports a comprehensive intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) approach.
Four main ISR use cases where Planet excels are:
- Unknown unknowns: Planet provides a wide, near-daily perspective on the world through our PlanetScope data feed. While high-resolution tasking satellites, like our Pelican, help provide information on known knowns or known unknowns where the tasker knows in advance where they want to look and when, our broad scan enables users to conduct exploration to discover activities they didn’t know to be looking for in the first place - unknown unknowns.
- Retrospective investigation: Robust, quick responses to late-discovered events prevent disinformation and plan ahead for future risks. By having a historical imagery archive, users are able to use new tools, such as machine learning, to train models on our deep stack of data. This helps bring information about past events to the surface and enable analysts to be better prepared for future events.
- Contingency operations: When support is called into action, teams need as much information on a given location or event as possible. Thanks to Planet’s combined offerings of medium-res, high-res, and hyperspectral imagery, we provide a diverse wealth of information for those looking to rapidly build a data-informed response plan.
Planet helps governments, enterprises, and the open-source intelligence (OSINT) community build situational awareness and address visibility gaps.
Explore our customer success stories to see how our innovative approach has further helped customers and partners across industries achieve their goals efficiently.
The Future of Satellite Imagery With Planet
As the world becomes more interconnected, technological innovations in satellite imagery will help predict and shape the future. Our commitment to continuous innovation demonstrates how the agile aerospace approach can help our users keep up with a rapidly changing world.
Contact us today to learn how Planet can help your organization.
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