VERY SMALL SATELLITES, VERY BIG DEAL


But it’s once all those images get back to Earth that the real magic begins. Planet has developed analytical algorithms that produce an array of products for:


• Agriculture—Planet’s continuous images of their fields allow farmers to understand changes in soil, crops, irrigation and disease, allowing them to farm more efficiently, profitably and sustainably.


• Governments—Planet’s imagery lets local governments track urban growth, unpermitted building and changing land use, and allows them to better manage regional transportation budgets, land use policy, economic development plans, disas- ter response, crisis management and humanitarian aid, such as in the case of the Northern California fires and Hurricanes Harvey and Irma.


BE AWED, BUT NOT OVERAWED


Among other benefits, the smaller size of Planet’s Dove satellites— about as big as a loaf of bread—brings the satellite down “off the pedestal,” in Schingler’s words, letting engineers see the whole system instead of just the subsystem they work on and think more critically about what it can do.


Teir idea was revolutionary. Satellites typically weigh over 3 tons and are about the size of a bus, take a decade or more to design and build and, by the time they’re deployed, are running on obsolete computing systems for the 10 or so years they’re in use. What Planet does is turn all that on its head. Each of their satellites (called Doves, and launched in Flocks) is roughly the size of a large shoebox and is built using commercial off-the- shelf technology.


Tey’re constantly being upgraded with the latest available tech- nology (the Dove is on its 14th iteration) for the roughly three years they’ll be in orbit. Tey take continuous daily photographs of Earth. Te difference between their images and, say, Google Earth’s is that Planet’s images are updated daily, rather than every few months, and are compiled into a cloud-based database, allowing users to compare changes to areas both large and small over time.


Te satellites, as Planet describes it, “act like a line scanner for the planet.” Custom automation software allows Planet’s Mis- sion Control team to schedule imaging windows, push new software in-orbit and download images to 30 ground stations worldwide. Te constellation of 190-plus satellites is akin to what the Army foresees as it pursues networked swarms.


230 Army AL&T Magazine January - March 2018


• Intelligence and defense—Planet provides transparency into global events, constantly photographing broad swaths of Earth and targeted areas of interest. Te images allow for monitor- ing of man-made and natural disasters; ports and shipping; and population shifts. Planet’s images after the recent North Korean nuclear test showed widespread landslides in the area surrounding the test site, suggesting to experts that the explo- sion was much larger than originally thought.


• Forestry—Images allow for improved monitoring of forest health, tracking of illegal logging and planning of timber- harvesting operations.


Planet also offers products for mapping; energy and infrastruc- ture; and finance and business intelligence.


Other companies, known as analytics-as-a-service companies, use their own algorithms to sort Planet’s data, and many of them, in turn, have partnered with Planet. A Jakarta-based ana- lytics company, Dattabot, used satellite data from Planet to help secure loans for Indonesian farmers.


Planet is at the leading edge of an exploding wave of space privatization, its satellites having hitched rides on U.S., Indian, Russian and private rocket launches. Planet and other satellite startups, including UrtheCast Corp., DigitalGlobe Inc. and Orbital Insight, are making Earth-imaging resources once reserved for governments available to businesses and the pub- lic. Companies such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Orbital Sciences Corp. and Blue Origin, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, are launching their own rockets into space.


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