Planet Labs, a leading provider of near-daily data and insights on Earth’s changing landscape, has released first-light images from its Pelican-6 satellite of Lhasa Gonggar International Airport in Tibet, China. The image was taken on December 4, from an altitude of approximately 519 km. Image quality is expected to improve as the spacecraft completes the instrument calibration process and reaches its final operational orbits. Pelican-5 and Pelican-6 launched on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 Transporter-15 mission on November 28, 2025, along with 36 SuperDoves.
“We’re proud to share first light imagery from our latest Pelican satellite. We had first light the day after launch, and I’m incredibly proud of the team’s work to rapidly build this fleet,” said Will Marshall, Co-Founder and CEO of Planet. “By leveraging our agile aerospace approach, we continue to address growing, global customer demand by rapidly building, deploying, and successfully integrating this growing constellation.”
Pelican-5 and Pelican-6 join Planet’s growing next-generation, high-resolution Pelican constellation. This first generation of Pelican satellites provides high-resolution imagery across 6 multispectral bands that are optimised for cross-sensor analysis. These Pelicans will support the ongoing delivery of Planet’s 50 cm products and have NVIDIA Jetson AI chips on board for on-orbit edge compute. Planet has designed its next-generation Pelican satellites to capture 30 cm-class resolution imagery.
