Planet

About Planet

Planet is the leading provider of global, daily satellite imagery and geospatial solutions. Planet is driven by a mission to image all of Earth’s landmass every day, and make global change visible, accessible and actionable. Planet provides mission-critical data, advanced insights, and software solutions to over 700 customers, comprising the world’s leading agriculture, forestry, intelligence, education and finance companies and government agencies, enabling users to simply and effectively derive unique value from satellite imagery.

Why is Copernicus important?

Planet is a Copernicus Contributing Mission (CCM) with its three optical constellations: SkySat (VHR1), PlanetScope (VHR2) and with the archive of the retired RapidEye constellation (HR1).

The mission of Planet is to image the entire Earth every day, and make global change visible, accessible, and actionable. This mission is realized thanks to the operation of the world’s largest fleet of Earth-imaging satellites, with approximately 200 satellites in operation.

The CCM on-demand portfolio offers the key Planet’s products that complement Copernicus users especially in Emergency, Security and Land services.

PlanetScope is the largest constellation imaging Earth every day, capturing over 3 million images each day with 3-4m Ground Sampling Distance (GSD). For the newest generation of PlanetScope satellites 6 of the 8 spectral bands are the same as those offered by Sentinel-2, which makes these datasets perfectly complementary for use cases, where Sentinel-2 spatial and/or temporal resolution is not sufficient alone.

Planet’s CCM portfolio also offers VHR1 SkySat constellation capabilities. These satellites operate from inclined and sun-synchronous orbits and are able to provide image products with 50cm pixel size. This constellation is capable of rapid revisit and can capture 6-7 images of a particular location on earth per day.

Planet follows an agile aerospace approach, which means that the PlanetScope and SkySat constellations and datasets are constantly being improved and created to complement the existing offer. It also means that the Copernicus users always have access to the newest data products.

Pelican, a next-generation fleet of satellites for VHR imagery, begins launching in 2022 and will be operational in 2023. When fully operational, the Pelican constellation replenishes and upgrades Planet’s existing high resolution SkySat fleet with better spatial resolution, more frequent image revisit times, and reduced reaction time and latency.

For the expected evolution of the Copernicus Contributing Missions, Planet offers not only new data types (i.a. SkySat Video, SkySat Stereo images, Basemaps, Planet Fusion Product) but also new data delivery models, such as data subscriptions to specific AOIs (“Area Under Management”) and data bundles to make use of the data.