Planet Labs offers open satellite imagery feed for disaster response

Planet Labs' Satellite Operations

Planet Labs, a 15-year-old San Francisco-based company, operates multiple satellite constellations that capture daily imagery of Earth's landmasses. The company recently deployed its Pelican-11 satellite via SpaceX's Transporter 17 Mission on July 7th, joining the Tanager constellation in Lower Low Earth Orbit (LLEO).

Currently, Planet Labs' Ephemerides service lists 97 satellites in orbit. The company's Hyperspectral Pelican constellation captures 426 bands of light, differing from its SuperDove and SkySat satellites.

Disaster Data Feed Availability

Planet Labs announced a new Disaster Data feed last year, which provides open access to select satellite imagery captured shortly after natural and man-made disasters. This initiative aims to support disaster response and analysis by making critical visual data readily available.

The feed is hosted on Cloudflare and is designed to be compatible with data analysis tools such as DuckDB and QGIS. Metadata accompanying the images is provided in Parquet and JSON file formats, facilitating integration and processing by users.

Accessing and Analyzing the Data

Users can access the satellite ephemerides data via a wget command to download the 'planet_mc.tle' file. Further processing using tools like 'grep' and 'cut' allows for the extraction of NORAD IDs, which can then be used with DuckDB to query satellite catalog information.

The open availability of disaster imagery and associated metadata allows for independent analysis of events, providing valuable resources for researchers, aid organizations, and other interested parties.