Planet Labs opens its satellite feed to the world
Planet Labs' open satellite feed
Planet Labs, the San Francisco-based satellite manufacturer and constellation operator, now offers an open feed of its satellite data. With 97 satellites still in orbit, the company captures imagery of Earth's entire landmass daily. This article details how to access and query the feed using tools like wget and DuckDB, and highlights recent launches, including the Pelican-11 satellite deployed by SpaceX's Transporter 17 mission.
Planet Labs is a 15-year-old, San Francisco-based satellite manufacturer and constellation operator.
- smallerfish
I wish Planet had better pricing for nonprofits. I co-run a conservation nonprofit focused on deforestation in Latin America, and our affordable choices are between 2 year old Google Earth imagery, 10m resolution Nimbo imagery (ok, but not sufficiently detailed to be evidentiary), and Sentinel 1 SAR data, which is useful but very noisy. Planet quoted us something like $30k per year for a strip of coastline that represents something like 5% of the territory we're monitoring, so it's just not a viable option under their current pricing model.
- Avicebron
Refreshingly doesn't feel like AI. If someone asked me "what does software engineering look like", I would point to this.
- aysanz
The geometry and bbox in these records aren't the same shape, which matters if
you're indexing them.
I ran the shoelace formula over the Nepal Pelican footprint from the post. The
bounding box around it comes out about 40% larger in area, so somewhere over a
quarter of that box is ground with no pixels behind it. That scene is only 3.8
degrees off-nadir as well. The summarize table further down has some going up
to 28.9, and those would be further off.
Indexing the bbox is the obvious move because it's four numbers and any
database will put an R-tree on it. But coverage queries then hand you scenes
for an AOI and the file turns up empty over that part of it. Took me longer
than it should have to work out why there was a hole in my mosaic.
Separately, eo:cloud_cover is one number for the whole scene. Sorting on it to
find your clearest option over a small area doesn't hold up. 85% cloud can
still be clear over the part you want. The UDM2s give you it per pixel, but
that's a second raster open per candidate before you can rank anything.
- maelito
Also checkout https://nlnet.nl/project/Mapterhorn-imagery for planet high-def satellite PMtiles. Not yet released.
- ricardobeat
Are most of their currently operating satellites servicing Flock - the US surveillance company? Or is it just a naming accident?