Earth Imagery from Space: Planet Labs

Planet Labs builds miniature-sized satellites that launch into orbit to take multi-spectral photography of Earth around the clock. The company has collected an ever-growing, searchable catalog of temporal high-resolution spatial imagery data. These satellites have an advantage in their size. At that small scale, engineers can apply an agile development approach where frequent iterations yield fast improvements to their design and lower costs to build or test. With multiple fleets of specialized satellites, the coverage is impressive and access to the catalog is massively informative. 

Users interact with a web explorer to request data from chosen locations within a frame of time. Changing patterns of human, physical, and environmental geography can play out for you virtually and on demand. Society and industry alike can find useful intelligence that aids decision-making. Applications include crop monitoring, water and forest management, human behavior analysis, transportation planning, national security, journalism, infrastructure monitoring, and resource management. To maximize the value of this data, Planet Labs offers a suite of additional products like updated base maps, analytics tools, GIS software integrations, and tasking capabilities. Planet delivers major components to the remote sensing process, solidifying the firm as a titan in the geospatial technology industry.

Images by Planet Labs