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

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.

Comments

dark matters II the hogwash; aired on POT

[Anonymous Coward]

(Personal Open Terminal). in this episode mutant crown royal dna is composted in the lhc. 'we're going to grow something here' was the official statement? viewers are feeling ill frequently... tbc ...

hymenologist's lament; missing monkey hymens
so do we really need them? where did they come from? dark matters for sure;;
1000s of our genuine spiritual & physical allys continue dying daily from 100% preventable starvation, rockets red glare, babys bursting in air etc... still no one is responsible,, or even aware.. momkind new clear options based on the universal spiritual axioms of tears & innocence equaling truth & mercy for all... meanwhile,, good medicine https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=stem+cell+therapy bad ama https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=nazi+zion+experiments.. turn it off http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=WMD+chemtrail+ingredients.. good neighbors http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUeNtM6qakk bad "weather' https://www.youtube.com/results? search_query=wmd+weather+media+censorship... we hang on to our hemispheres as the lights are coming up all over now..... rock on /. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-kA3UtBj4M

Spacejunk

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Spacejunk

[MozeeToby]

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.

Re:Spacejunk

[DougOtto]

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

Re:Spacejunk

[mikerubel]

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.

Re:Spacejunk

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Spacejunk

[Agripa]

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.

Smallest?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

COTS and no internal redundancy

[Actually, I do RTFA]

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".

Re: COTS and no internal redundancy

[bitflusher]

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)

Re:COTS and no internal redundancy

[Sir Holo]

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.

Re:COTS and no internal redundancy

[Actually, I do RTFA]

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.

No "globe" images?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are all the images of a piece of the Earth?

Why, just like NASA, do they not show images of the entire Earth as a ball hanging in space with stars around it? All NASA images are composites and most of their images are the same, with duplicated ("copy/pasted") cloud formations.

The founder got his start at NASA, might be a reason why.

Upon closer inspection, images 17-20 show a portion of "the globe" but, just like NASA, they never show the entire globe, and it never has stars surrounding it.

I'm not convinced that the Earth is flat. However, I am convinced that NASA has lied. The Van Allen belts contain radiation that would fry a man going through it, and they didn't know this back during the Apollo missions. The highest the shuttle has gone is 300+ miles, nowhere near the 1000 miles at which the Van Allen belts start, and the astronauts in that shuttle could close their eyes and see "shooting stars" which was the radiation from being that close to the belts. When asked if they saw these same shooting stars with their eyes closed, the elderly panel of astronauts initially said they didn't see anything, and then backpedaled.

Samuel Rowbotham did an experiment (the "Bedford Level" experiment) showing that over four miles, the surface of a canal did not drop below the horizon. There are videos showing a ship "over the horizon" being brought back into view using a telephoto lens. This should not be possible on a globular Earth.

I'll stop here as this is something I was exposed to recently, and don't have all the arguments, and also haven't done many of my own experiments. I intend to.

flash video - I thought those were forboden now

[Anonymous Coward]

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

I don't want to have unprotected vids.

100 Launched != 100 in orbit

[Anonymous Coward]

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.