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Planet Labs PBC, a provider of daily data and insights about Earth, announced that its Pelican tech demonstration satellite, Pelican-1, along with 36 SuperDoves, has arrived at Vandenberg Space Force Base in preparation for launch next month. <\/p>\n
Pelican-1, designed and manufactured by Planet, is the first tech demonstration of Planet\u2019s next-generation, high-resolution fleet, which is expected to replenish and improve upon Planet\u2019s existing high-resolution systems in orbit today. The 36 SuperDoves, Planet\u2019s Flock 4q, will contribute to Planet\u2019s daily monitoring PlanetScope mission.<\/p>\n
Pelican-1 is a technology demonstration, built to test Pelican\u2019s integrated design and Planet\u2019s common bus platform. This common bus platform, designed and built by Planet, will also host the Company\u2019s future hyperspectral Tanager mission. Planet launches tech demonstrations across all of its new satellite fleets in order to prove out next-generation systems, test its latest technology, and learn from its performance, improving the scalability of its systems along the way. Pelican-1 is not expected to produce commercial data, but rather obtain critical information and learnings needed to iterate the Pelican design and rapidly scale to a fleet using Planet\u2019s agile aerospace approach. <\/p>\n
When fully operational, the Pelican constellation is planned to improve upon every dimension of Planet\u2019s existing high-resolution SkySat constellation – faster acquisition and delivery of data, better spatial resolution to see finer details, higher revisit to catch fleeting events, and more ways to combine insights with other analytics and sensors.<\/p>\n
The 36 SuperDoves launching will contribute to Planet\u2019s flagship daily, global monitoring mission. This data is used by hundreds of customers in defense, civil government, and commercial markets to take informed action, and better contextualize events they\u2019re seeing on the ground today. Planet\u2019s daily scan and deep archive of data for every point on Earth is unique within the industry and provides customers with a continuous and complete view of their areas of interest. Further, the archive acts as a rich training ground for predictive machine learning and advanced artificial intelligence models, accelerating users\u2019 ability to draw insights from the terabytes of data collected by Planet each day.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe launch of our first Pelican tech demonstration marks an exciting milestone for us,\u201d said Will Marshall, co-founder and CEO of Planet<\/strong>. \u201cThis new spacecraft bus is an exquisite system that will underpin both our Pelican and Tanager fleets and we can\u2019t wait to learn and iterate in our agile aerospace model. The 36 SuperDoves also launching are not to be overlooked. They will join the flock we have in-orbit today, which remains the largest earth imaging fleet, providing our unique daily scan that is helping to unlock new markets.\u201d<\/p>\n Planet is committed to delivering best-in-class data and services to its customers and expects this launch of Pelican-1 and 36 SuperDoves will help further the company\u2019s mission of making change visible, accessible, and actionable. As the launch window nears, Planet, alongside its launch partner, will be sharing more details. Stay tuned.<\/p>\n