openpolitics.com

Instead of chasing resolution to see more with a single picture, we’re going after a high temporal cadence to see things every day. The beauty is that this lets people take action with the data. For example, deforestation monitoring typically focuses on monthly reports to track acres that are damaged. With Planet, a park service can get an alert within a day and go and stop it.

.. The idea to get a complete snapshot is unprecedented. If you look at the satellite imagery in Google Maps, for example, it might be a couple months old in major cities. Outside of these dense areas, updates can take years.

.. When a disaster happens, there will be tons of shots the next day (e.g. in Haiti or Nepal after an earthquake), but no one’s watching the day before. The historical forensics make Planet really different.

.. Our customers in agriculture focus on the health of plants. We capture red, green, blue channels and also near-infrared. This is a non-visible band that plugs into a new algorithm called NDVI to approximate plant health.

.. Whenever you look at Google Maps, thousands of images are stitched together to give a consistent view. That process of stitching the images together is mostly done by hand.