These satellites are also playing a major role in the fight against deforestation and climate change. Planet is creating a searchable database for the Earth that has implications for almost every industry from agriculture to homeland security. That software aims to do for Earth observation what Google did for the early internet. They are then replaced with more up-to-date satellites, allowing Planet to constantly iterate and test new technologies.Īnd while completing a 4 million photograph line scan of the Earth on a daily basis is a major component of Planet’s business, the real value is in the artificially intelligent software that is being built on top of these images. Because there is still friction from the atmosphere at that altitude, the satellites have a short life span of a few years before they spiral into the Earth and burn up in the atmosphere. Planet has more than 200 mini satellites, built with the newest off the shelf technology, performing a daily line scan of the Earth from about 450km of altitude. Now there is so much imagery that more and more, governments and enterprises need help understanding what matters, extracting signal from the noise.” “Now thanks to Planet and the rest of the space industry the problem is the opposite. “If you go back and look even ten years ago, having access to a satellite image was something powerful,” says Kevin Weil, President of Product and Business at Planet. Since then, thousands of satellites have been orbiting the Earth and transmitting photos of our “blue marble” back down to us. That photo became the first of millions of Earth observation photos to come in the following decades. On August 23, 1966, the first picture of Earth was snapped by Lunar Orbiter 1. But a San Francisco company founded in 2010, called Planet, is forcing a paradigm shift in the Earth Observation industry by shooting hundreds of state of the art, relatively inexpensive, shoebox sized satellites into space and indexing the entire surface of the world every single day. At the speed technology improves, many satellites are stuck operating obsolete hardware not long after launch. Most of them cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build and take the better part of a decade to develop and launch. (The 3-D effect requires the use of red-blue glasses.Satellites are usually very big and very expensive. Two pictures, taken 10 minutes apart, were combined to produce a 3-D stereo view. The imagery was captured as the orbiter flew beneath the 13.5-mile-wide (22-kilometer-wide) moon, at a distance of 3,600 to 4,200 miles (5,800 to 6,800 kilometers). Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter follows a track ranging from 155 to 196 miles (250 to 316 kilometers) above the Red Planet. "The new images will help constrain the origin and evolution of this moon." "But the HiRISE images are higher quality, making the new data some of the best ever for Phobos," Bridges said in Wednesday's advisory. Phobos has been the subject of orbital imagery since the days of the Viking orbiters in the 1970s, and some spacecraft have taken higher-resolution pictures of the moon because they flew closer, said Nathan Bridges, a HiRISE team member at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "Phobos is of great interest because it may be rich in water ice and carbon-rich materials," Alfred McEwen, principal investigator for the HiRISE camera at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, said in a NASA image advisory.
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