Planet's satellites offer customers a new world view every day

BUILT by the Indian Space Research Organisation, the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle threw itself into the sky at 3.58am GMT on February 15th. It took with it a record-breaking 104 satellites'88 of which belonged to a single company, Planet, a remote sensing business based in San Francisco. Planet now has 149 satellites in orbit'enough for it to provide its customers with new moderately detailed images of all the Earth's land surface every single day.The satellites Planet makes'it calls them 'doves''measure 10cm by 10cm by 30cm. The first doves, launched five years ago, could send back pictures of just 3,000 square kilometres a day. But the satellites have followed a trajectory of improvement much closer to that seen in cell-phones'from which they get some of their components'than the established satellite industry. The latest doves can cover 2.5m square kilometres a day.The expanded fleet of satellites will send over 3 terabytes of data a day to more than 30 receiver stations spread around the Earth. After processing to remove distortions and to locate each image, the data will be in the cloud and ready for the company's...Continue reading
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