Planet Labs' Open Satellite Feed

Planet Labs is a 15-year-old, San Francisco-based satellite manufacturer and constellation operator. They operate or have operated four different constellations throughout their history and capture imagery of the entire Earth's landmasses every day. As of this writing, LinkedIn lists the firm as having 1,751 associated members.

Their latest Pelican-11 satellite, which will join their Tanager constellation, was deployed by SpaceX's Transporter 17 Mission on July 7th.

As of this writing, Planet Labs' Ephemerides service lists 97 of their satellites that are still in orbit. These are their latest details from GCAT .

These are the spectrum response levels of their SuperDove and SkySat satellites compared alongside RapidEye, Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2.

The Hyperspectral Pelican constellation differs from their other constellations as its satellites capture 426 bands of light. I reviewed some of its free imagery last year.

Last year, Planet Labs announced a new Disaster Data feed. This is a Cloudflare-hosted, DuckDB & QGIS-friendly feed with select imagery they've captured from various natural and man-made disasters shortly after they've occurred. The metadata describing the images is shipped as Parquet and JSON files.

In this post, I'll analyse the imagery they've captured and published openly this year.