Planet’s latest rideshare mission is a useful marker for where commercial Earth observation is heading: more capacity in orbit, more specialised sensing and more computing moving closer to the sensor.

Planet has announced the successful launch of 20 satellites via SpaceX’s Transporter-18 mission which launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base on 1st October. The payload included 18 SuperDoves, Planet’s Tanager-2 hyperspectral satellite and a demonstrator for Google’s Project Suncatcher.

Planet said it had made initial contact with Tanager-2, the Project Suncatcher prototype and two SuperDoves while the remaining 16 SuperDoves were due to deploy from a D-Orbit ION orbital transfer vehicle.

Three strands of a commercial EO stack

The SuperDoves are designed to refresh Planet’s daily optical-imagery capability. Tanager-2 extends the company’s hyperspectral capacity which is a data type with particular relevance to emissions detection and environmental monitoring. Alongside these EO spacecraft, the Project Suncatcher satellite will test Google tensor processing units in space.

The combination is interesting as the EO commercial offer is increasingly becoming a combination of factors: revisit and coverage from a constellation, specialised measurements from targeted sensors and faster processing to turn observations into decisions. The majority of customers want usable information rather than a larger archive of raw pixels.

Why it matters to businesses

For BARSC members working in climate, infrastructure, insurance, agriculture, maritime and supply-chain services, value will increasingly sit in assembling the right mix of data, analytics and delivery workflow for a particular operational decision. Hyperspectral data can create new products around methane and other emissions whilst on-orbit processing experiments point towards shorter timelines for prioritising the most relevant observations.

Also, new spacecraft do not become a service at launch as first-contact, deployment, calibration and commissioning still determine when data can support a customer commitment. Downstream providers should retain sensible fallbacks, explain those dependencies in service-level discussions and validate new feeds before incorporating them into critical workflows.

What to watch next

Planet’s statement makes clear that the remaining SuperDoves still need to deploy and all new assets need to complete commissioning. The practical milestones for users are therefore operational data availability, calibration performance and how the company turns the added capacity into products and contracts.

Source: Planet Labs announcement via Business Wire.

Further reading: Yahoo Finance coverage.