Planet Labs' open satellite feed (tech.marksblogg.com)

91 pointsby marklit4 hours ago17 comments

smallerfish 3 hours ago

I wish Planet had better pricing for nonprofits. I co-run a conservation nonprofit focused on deforestation in Latin America, and our affordable choices are between 2 year old Google Earth imagery, 10m resolution Nimbo imagery (ok, but not sufficiently detailed to be evidentiary), and Sentinel 1 SAR data, which is useful but very noisy. Planet quoted us something like $30k per year for a strip of coastline that represents something like 5% of the territory we're monitoring, so it's just not a viable option under their current pricing model.

marklit 2 hours ago

What sort of budget does your org support?

I had to look into ~19 imagery firms for some telco work in Canada last year.

There are private jets that can capture 10cm imagery and can pick the ideal weather window to fly in.

There are also firms that fly balloons 20 - 80 KM off the ground that can capture 4cm imagery.

The space is pretty busy.

smallerfish 2 hours ago

We're volunteer driven and currently rely on personal donations, so we're scrappy. We could probably justify somewhere in the region of $10k/yr. The jets/balloon angle is interesting, thanks - hadn't occurred to me, and I'll search through what's out there.

marklit 2 hours ago

See if you can negotiate reselling the imagery they sell you. It might be hard to get agreement with this as the vendor will have you both as a customer and compeditor but if you pull it off, you could recoup your costs and then some. For a few weeks, no one else in the private sector will have the freshness and/or quality of imagery you do.

embedding-shape 2 hours ago

> The jets/balloon angle is interesting

Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but what about drones? Probably would have to get permits most likely, but still might be cheaper than alternatives (although balloons are hard to beat when it comes to costs, not always reusable though).

marklit 2 hours ago

Drones (and helicopters) do have their market as well. A lot of engineering firms I saw would go with one of these two, depending on the situation.

Scoundreller an hour ago

How many years away are we from a cheap drone that will takeoff, land, solar recharge, repeat until it returns to you a few weeks later with a few tb of SD cards of high res imagery?

smallerfish an hour ago

We do use a drone when we know of a site where deforestation has taken place. The gap we're trying to fill is early detection of forest intervention, so that we can alert appropriate agencies (who are generally under-resourced) and get an inspection to take place while activity is ongoing.

sveme an hour ago

Really busy, from satellite constellation tasking to planet and co basemaps to the sentinel family to aerial imagery to helicopters, drones and even blimps.

They all have their unique combination of cost, resolution, area coverage, revisit rate and spectral modes. Quite difficult sometimes to find a good fit for the underlying problem. What‘s clear is that resolution and revisit rate correlate with cost. Shit‘s expensive.

Avicebron 3 hours ago

Refreshingly doesn't feel like AI. If someone asked me "what does software engineering look like", I would point to this.

ge96 3 hours ago

This is cool, learned of two new file extensions: .tle and .parquet

coinfused 41 minutes ago

I am using DuckDB + Parquet + HTTP range requests for a current project and it's a great combination for data exploration tools that run in the browser.

CrzyLngPwd 41 minutes ago

Pictured with three of the worst russophobes and most rabid euro warmongers.

Such a shame.

ricardobeat 3 hours ago

Are most of their currently operating satellites servicing Flock - the US surveillance company? Or is it just a naming accident?

mandevil 2 hours ago

Flock is Planet Labs name for the mega-constellation of imaging satellites made up of 3U cubesats known as Doves- hence the name for the full constellation. It has nothing to do with the automated license plate reader company.

marklit 2 hours ago

Their satellites have nothing to do with the street-level surveillance camera firm.

hangonhn 2 hours ago

The latter I would think. I can see how you can confuse the two. The reason I think otherwise is because you don't name the satellite after one client, especially if you're in the business of selling images/data, not satellites. And a flock of satellites make sense for a name.