Planet Labs

Planet Labs built something that had never existed before: a system that photographs the entire landmass of Earth every single day, at resolution sufficient to count individual trees, track construction projects, and monitor crop health field by field. The company operates the largest constellation of Earth-imaging satellites in history, over 200 spacecraft that collectively produce more imagery data per day than all previous satellite imaging systems combined. It is not, strictly speaking, an astronomy company. But its approach to space-based observation, deploying massive constellations of small, cheap, rapidly iterated satellites, has influenced how astronomers think about survey design, data pipelines, and the economics of observation.

Origins: Three NASA Scientists and a CubeSat

Planet Labs was founded in 2010 by Will Marshall, Robbie Schingler, and Chris Boshuizen, all of whom had worked at NASA Ames Research Center. Their insight was that the traditional approach to Earth observation satellites (build one massive, expensive, exquisitely engineered spacecraft that lasts 15 years) was optimized for the wrong variable. Governments and commercial users didn't just want high resolution; they wanted temporal frequency. Knowing what a location looked like yesterday was often more valuable than knowing what it looked like at higher resolution last month.

The solution was to invert the design philosophy: instead of one expensive satellite imaging a narrow swath of Earth at high resolution, build hundreds of cheap satellites that collectively image everything at moderate resolution every day. The individual spacecraft could be simpler, lighter, and shorter-lived (3-5 years), because the constellation would be continuously replenished. Hardware failures that would doom a traditional mission were absorbed by the constellation's redundancy.

The first Planet Labs satellites were 3U CubeSats (roughly the size of a loaf of bread) called Doves, built on commercial electronics and launched in batches as secondary payloads. Early Doves had limited capability, but each generation incorporated improvements. The company embraced a Silicon Valley iteration model: launch, learn, improve, launch again. Hardware development cycles were months, not years.

The Constellation Today

Planet's current constellation consists of three satellite families. The SuperDoves (roughly 200 active spacecraft) provide daily global coverage at 3-5 meter resolution in multiple spectral bands, including visible, near-infrared, and (on newer variants) 8-band multispectral capability. The SkySats (roughly 20 spacecraft, originally built by Terra Bella and acquired through Google) provide sub-meter resolution imagery and video capability for targeted collection. The Pelican satellites, a next-generation high-resolution line, are designed to deliver sub-meter daily revisit capability.

The combined output is staggering: over 30 terabytes of imagery per day, covering approximately 350 million square kilometers of land surface. The data is processed through automated pipelines that orthorectify (correct for terrain distortion), calibrate (normalize brightness and color across scenes), and mosaic (stitch individual frames into seamless regional and global coverages) the imagery in near real-time.

Applications: From Agriculture to Intelligence

Planet's customer base spans commercial agriculture (crop monitoring, yield prediction, irrigation management), forestry (deforestation tracking, carbon stock estimation), insurance (disaster damage assessment, property verification), maritime (vessel tracking, port activity monitoring), urban planning (construction monitoring, infrastructure assessment), climate science (ice sheet monitoring, wildfire mapping), and government intelligence (military activity monitoring, sanctions enforcement).

The agricultural applications alone represent a transformational capability. Precision agriculture requires frequent, spatially detailed information about crop health, soil moisture, and growth stage. Planet's daily revisit at field-level resolution enables farmers and agricultural companies to detect irrigation problems, pest outbreaks, and nutrient deficiencies days or weeks earlier than ground-based monitoring. In developing countries where agricultural extension services are limited, satellite-derived crop information can reach farmers via mobile phone, improving yields and food security.

The climate and environmental monitoring applications are equally significant. Planet's archive enables change detection at global scale: tracking deforestation rates in the Amazon and Southeast Asia, monitoring glacier retreat, mapping urban sprawl, and documenting the environmental impact of industrial activity. The Norwegian government's NICFI program uses Planet data to provide tropical forest monitoring for free to researchers and civil society organizations worldwide.

Relevance to Astronomy

Planet Labs is not an astronomy company, but its influence on astronomical survey design is substantial. The same principles that make Planet's constellation effective, massive parallelism, continuous temporal coverage, automated data processing, and machine learning for classification, are being applied to astronomical surveys.

The Vera Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) shares Planet's core insight: in many scientific contexts, temporal cadence (how often you observe) matters as much as depth (how faint you can see). LSST will photograph the entire visible sky every few nights, detecting transient phenomena (supernovae, asteroid movements, variable stars) through their changes over time. The data pipeline challenges, processing petabytes of imagery per year, classifying millions of objects automatically, distributing alerts in real-time, are directly analogous to the challenges Planet has already solved at scale for Earth observation.

Planet's hardware iteration model has also influenced space telescope concepts. The argument that cheaper, more numerous telescopes refreshed on shorter cycles might outperform fewer, more expensive, long-lived observatories is gaining traction in astronomical mission planning. NASA's Astrophysics Probe-class missions and the proliferation of CubeSat-based astrophysics experiments reflect this shift.

Data Platform and AI

Planet's business model has evolved from selling individual satellite images to providing a data platform with analytics capabilities. Planet Insights Platform allows customers to query the global archive, apply machine learning models to extract features (building footprints, road networks, vessel types, crop classifications), and monitor change over time through automated alerting.

The AI/ML pipeline processes imagery at a scale that manual analysis cannot approach. Automated forest change detection, for example, can identify individual clearings within days of their creation, enabling enforcement agencies to respond to illegal deforestation in near real-time. Similar capabilities are being developed for maritime domain awareness, infrastructure monitoring, and agricultural forecasting.