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Planet, the New Space commercial Earth observation company that operates the largest constellation of imaging satellites, and Orbital Insight, a leading company specialising in geospatial analytics, announced on 19 September 2018 a multi-year contract for Orbital Insight to source daily, global satellite imagery from Planet. The contract is an expansion of their previous imagery-sharing agreement.
Orbital Insight’s contract with Planet comes days after the company signed a similar agreement with Airbus Defence and Space for the provision of satellite imagery taken by SPOT and Pléiades satellites.
“Orbital Insight has been a fantastic partner for Planet, and we are looking forward to continuing our relationship as they develop analytics that make our imagery more accessible and actionable for businesses,” said Will Marshall, CEO and co-founder of Planet. “The partnership signals the market’s confidence in the growing number of use cases for insights derived from daily global imagery with advanced analytics.”
Orbital Insight develops analytics software using geospatial datasets, such as Planet’s imagery collections, providing timely intelligence to decision-makers across various industries. With this new contract Orbital Insight will have greater access to Planet’s daily, 3.7 meter resolution PlanetScope imagery, as well as .72 centimeter resolution SkySat imagery for any location on Earth. The high-frequency revisit rate and broad geographic coverage of Planet’s imagery makes it well-suited to specific Orbital Insight use cases, including counting cars, trains, and ships, as well as monitoring commercial and residential real estate construction. The spirit of the partnership is to foster a closer working relationship across commercial markets and humanitarian initiatives.
“Our goal is to build the best geospatial analytics in the world. To achieve that end, we rely on Planet as a key partner to provide high-quality satellite imagery,” said Dr. James Crawford, founder and CEO of Orbital Insight. “Both companies are early movers in the commercial space industry, so we are pleased to continue and deepen our relationship.”
Planet is an integrated aerospace and data analytics company that currently operates the largest fleet of Earth-imaging satellites. Planet designs, builds, and operates over 150 satellites, and develops the online software and tools that serves data to users. Decision makers in business, government, and other organisations are regular users of Planet’s satellite-derived data.
Orbital Insight develops geospatial analytics to help its clients unlock societal and economic trends at a global scale. Orbital Insight source’s petabytes of satellite, drone, balloon, and other unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) data. Using computer vision and machine learning technologies, Orbital Insight processes and transforms this data to enable businesses, governments, and NGOs to make decisions.
