Artist’s rendition of satellites orbiting the Earth – rottenman/123RF Stock Photo
In 2011 when the satellite company Planet started, it set itself a ‘Mission 1’ which was to image the entire Earth’s landmass every day. Six years later in November 2017, they confirmed they had achieved that goal through its Dove satellite constellations.
During the same year they acquired the SkySat constellation from Google, and yesterday they announced their intention to launch six new SkySat satellites which will enable them to capture some locations on the Earth up to 12 times each day. Locations near fifty-three degrees Latitude will have this 12 times a day capability, whereas more generally around the globe it will only offer an average of 7 revisits per day.
The existing SkySat constellation has recently been lowered from their 500 km orbits to a polar inclined circular orbit at approximately 450 km altitude, which has increased their spatial resolution from 80 cm to 50 cm for their ortho product.
The six SkySats will be put into orbit via SpaceX Falcon 9 launches. This is an interesting partnership because, as we described in our blog two weeks ago, these two companies are the biggest players in terms of numbers of satellites in space, with SpaceX leading Planet. When the next batch of Starlink satellites are launched shortly, three SkySats will be with them on the journey; something that will be repeated in a launch next month.
This rapid revisit capability at a spatial resolution of 50 cm will offer customers the capability to task the Planet satellites to capture the images they require through a Tasking Dashboard; automatically tasking the satellites. This multi-day imaging will enable applications such as human activity, for example, transport or monitoring buildings, and supporting disaster relief efforts. Also, anyone looking for a cloud-free image of a location each day, this offers more opportunity to acquire it.
In two other Earth Observation (EO) satellite announcements this week:
- Nigeria Space Research and Development Agency (NASRDA) announced it is working on launching a new satellite to replace NigeriaSat-2 which was developed and built by SSTL. NigeriaSat-2 was launched on August 17th 2011 and offers both colour and panchromatic images with a swath width of 20 km. The satellite’s data supports food supply security, agricultural, geology, mapping and security applications. Its original mission life was only expected to be seven and a half years so, as is often the case, it has exceeded expectations but does need to be replaced.
- This week Turkey has also announced plans for a high-resolution EO satellite to be launched in 2021. The new satellite is planned to go into a sun-synchronous orbit at approximately 680 km altitude and will offer colour imagery at a 3.6 m spatial resolution, and panchromatic imagery at 90 cm resolution.
The EO industry is still making rapid developments and as the amount, and frequency, of data increases, new opportunities and innovations are bound to follow. It will be interesting to see what can be done with these multiple images every day.
