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Planet Labs Has Launched Over 100 Imaging Satellites with Many More to Come (Video)

Posted by Roblimo on from the most-orbit-acquired-Earth-imagery-is-10-months-to-10-years-old dept.

According to a recent CNN article, Planet Labs produces Great photos of Earth from the world's smallest satellites. Most satellites these days are about the size of a car. Planet Labs micro-satellites are closer to the size of a shoebox. The company was founded in 2012 and has attracted major venture capital. They're using that money to launch an ever-increasing number of Flocks (their word) of satellites they call "Doves," which are basically nothing but cameras and simple comm equipment, along with solar panels, batteries, and control circuitry required to make everything work. Interviewee Shaun Meehan gets into most of this in the video; for more detail, please read the transcript.

15 comments

  1. Spacejunk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Does this result in a lot of debris that someday we're going to figure out how to deal with? A car-sized object is almost trackable from the ground. A shoebox sized object seems like it's likely to get lost.

    I assume most are deployed to fall back to earth.

    1. Re:Spacejunk by MozeeToby · · Score: 2

      Their smaller size means they experience higher drag relative to their mass, they will fall out of orbit much more quickly than a full sized satellite in a similar orbit would. Since they are earth observing, and with very limited optics I would venture a guess that they are in a very low orbit and will come down relatively quickly.

    2. Re:Spacejunk by DougOtto · · Score: 1

      The company web site confirms your guess. They maintain a very low orbit to minimize potential of becoming space junk.

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    3. Re:Spacejunk by mikerubel · · Score: 1

      Planet Labs' approach to orbital debris mitigation is discussed here: https://www.planet.com/pulse/k... tl;dr the satellites re-enter and burn up very quickly, most within a year or so.

    4. Re:Spacejunk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Does size really affect the rate at which an object's orbit decays? Isn't density more of a factor?

    5. Re:Spacejunk by Agripa · · Score: 1

      For a given density, the satellite's cross sectional area (and drag) are proportional to the square of the linear size but the mass is proportional to the cube of the linear size so drag has a smaller effect on larger satellites.

  2. Smallest? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Wasn't there just an article the other day about 4"x4"x4" satellite that was going to get scooped up?

  3. COTS and no internal redundancy by Actually,+I+do+RTFA · · Score: 2

    So, reading this the one thing that I get above all else is their plan is to accept a very high failure rate and make up for it with more units sent to space. I wonder if this approaching being economically viable is a good thing or not for space exploration. Are more companies that have high acceptable losses going to lead to a general prevalence in the industry. Which might mean that, like secure software, hardware capable of getting men to Mars might be considered "unachievable".

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    1. Re: COTS and no internal redundancy by bitflusher · · Score: 1

      I think as a whole they are extremely redundant. Like off site redundancy for servers. Strapping two shoeboxes together would make less sense as stereo vision does not add much at this distance (i presume but have not researched)

    2. Re:COTS and no internal redundancy by Sir+Holo · · Score: 1

      hardware capable of getting men to Mars might be considered "unachievable".

      They said nothing about a Mars mission. They do Earth imaging.

      Get your goals straight. "Space" is not one monolithic goal, but myriad goals, each with their own design-optimization parameters.

    3. Re:COTS and no internal redundancy by Actually,+I+do+RTFA · · Score: 1

      I understand that this company has no desire to go to Mars. But clearly, they've looked at the costs of launching things into orbit, and the cost of perfecting things, and it's better to overlaunch for redundancy than have redundant systems onboard. If launches are cheap enough then they can just try to launch supplies to the IIS and have it blow up on the launch pad three times.

      Although space is not monolithic, people hired for a Mars shot are going to be hired from the "space" industry/education. If we delay a few generations (as seems likely) before manned missions to Mars, I worry about ossified conventional wisdom that says we have to accept 75% losses of people. Especially if that means they don't try hard enough to save lives. And especially if that means we never get off this rock.

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  4. flash video - I thought those were forboden now by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    I thought we weren't supposed to use flash any more. CVE's & mozilla & facebook

    I don't want to have unprotected vids.

  5. 100 Launched != 100 in orbit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    NORAD is tracking 22 Flock satellites now. Half of those are in higher a polar orbit (not from the ISS) so they would be lower resolution.

    In order to keep 100 in orbit at around ISS altitude and assuming a half life of about 6 months, they'd need to launch and orbit 12/month continually.

    I doubt the ISS has the capacity to support this indefinitely.