PLANET TINY SATELLITE
LET THE DOVES FLY TO ORBIT
“If AI is the Wild West, does that mean data is the new gold?” Matthew McConaughey muses rhetorically in a TV ad for a major software solutions provider.
Data has always been golden, even before the word went mainstream. Whether you’re trying to sell shampoo or launch a rocket, more is more. We just needed the bots to sort through it all.
Here’s a company taking data truly global, and to new heights.
Every 24 hours, Planet’s 200+ satellites beam down images of the entirety of Earth’s land masses. That’s as real-time as it gets and optimizes response opportunities. Its data is the highest frequency in the industry, used by governments and urban developers, and in sectors like mapping, agriculture, and forestry.
Wow! But perhaps you’re thinking, what about OwlVoices’ blog piece on "noctalgia" noting how a proliferation of satellites is a big contributor to the loss of dark skies?
Planet was launched in a Silicon Valley garage in 2010 by three NASA scientists who knew well their biggest hurdle was billion-dollar satellites and extended launch schedules. So, they designed their own “tiny, inexpensive, earth-imaging powerhouses that can deliver data on demand,” that could be launched in batches. Their smallest, Doves, are a mere 30x10x10 centimeters, the size of a shoebox. Compare that to the typical communications satellite at seven meters long, with another 50 meters of solar panels.
Planet spent a decade building and launching satellites, creating a platform that uses machine learning to make the information it collects as usable as possible for its customers. With a data archive that grows by 15 terabytes daily, it’s no exaggeration when they call it a “search engine for the planet.”
Co-founder and CEO Will Marshall told an audience at a UN climate conference about some of the remarkable results of their monitoring. They’ve discovered oil spills in New Mexico and missile silos in western China. Before and after images have been used in thousands of court cases to hold landowners accountable for misuse.
Governments immediately protected coral reefs after Planet released a global map that used spectral bands to identify coral by type. And regarding the battle against deforestation, “We can see every tree.”
Monitoring enables predictions about flooding to warn people in areas that will be affected and tracks wildfires to aid in emergency response. A recently launched fleet called Carbon Mapper is used to detect exact sources of CO2 and methane emissions. The timing was no coincidence, coming as efforts to meet climate targets moved the spotlight onto accountability.
Summing it up, Marshall said, “You can’t fix what you can’t see.”
This falls into the category of solutions the innovators in the OwlVoices community tell us will endure; straightforward concepts that are breakthroughs because they address every nuance toward usability.
