Pelican Satellite Constellation Unveiled by Planet
Details about the next-generation Pelican satellite constellation, designed to efficiently capture brief and rapidly changing events as they unfold, have been unveiled by Planet.
"We have designed our next generation ‘Pelican’ fleet to meet the evolving needs of customers who want real-time information about global events as they unfold."
Planet Co-Founder and CEO Will Marshall.
The Pelican satellite constellation was designed in-house and is expected to be built at our manufacturing facility in San Francisco. The advancements of this brand new constellation represent a leap forward in capabilities for our customers – from higher revisit and higher spatial resolution, to faster data access and delivery.
“We are seeing strong and growing demand from multiple market segments for our high resolution products today. We have designed our next generation ‘Pelican’ fleet to meet the evolving needs of customers who want real-time information about global events as they unfold – from floods and wildfires to political conflicts and threats to human rights. Pelican’s rapid response and higher resolution will do exactly that,” said Planet Co-Founder and CEO Will Marshall.
Pelican is expected to begin launching early next year and to consist of the following specifications:
Up to 32 new tasking satellites, which will replenish and improve upon the capabilities of our existing 21 SkySats.
Increased rapid revisit, as customers are expected to be able to task images of the same location up to 12 times per day, and will even have 30 opportunities in mid latitudes.
Reduced latency for downloading data, creating shorter time loops between tasking and receiving data across the world.
Higher resolution capabilities with up to 30 cm resolution imagery
This next-generation constellation is expected to monitor patterns of life, like shifting political borders and changing coastlines, and help characterize drivers of environmental change that are threatening protected ecosystems. The advancements are intended to provide Planet's clients across global industries and governments with the ability to respond to global events with more speed and better informed insights. With such revisit capacity, our users should be able to capture transitory events occuring in one location, increasing their likelihood of obtaining a high quality image even during unpredictable or cloudy weather. These new rapid and accurate insights will be particularly valuable for monitoring regions with fleeting events, like unstable conflict zones or areas vulnerable to storms and fires that spread rapidly over space and time.
Planet is currently seeing strong and growing demand from multiple market segments for real-time data from our high-resolution products, including the defense sector for security intelligence, civil government for disaster response, and software companies for mapping platforms. Pelican was designed to meet these growing needs as a state-of-the-art rapid revisit and very high resolution satellite system, delivering information faster and more accurately.
Planet designed Pelican to leverage and advance on that interoperability so we can continue to pioneer unique and comprehensive datasets to answer our customers’ questions. Combined with a full suite of daily, global monitoring data and analytics solutions, the company believes Pelican will help drive critical decision-making for aid organizations, businesses, international NGOs, and governments.
(Source: Planet news release. Image provided)