NASA awards Planet $7 million Earth imagery contract

NASA awards Planet $7 million Earth imagery contract


Updated 12:30 pm Eastern time with comment from Jen Marcus of Planet Federal.

SAN FRANCISCO – NASA employees, contractors and NASA-funded research teams will have access to Planet Earth observation imagery under a $7 million contract option the San Francisco company announced April 16.

“We have unlimited access to all PlanetScope data,” Kevin Murphy, program executive for NASA’s Earth Science Data System, told SpaceNews. “We found the greatest value in the global three-meter data.”

NASA announced plans to purchase Earth observation data from Maxar Technologies, Planet and Spire in 2018 as part of a pilot program to evaluate the utility of commercial data. The space agency determined the imagery was valuable but sometimes struggled with licenses that prevented some types of data sharing and publication of research. NASA bought Planet imagery for a climate research pilot program under a $6.7 million contract announced in April 2019.

During the pilot program, 35 NASA principal investigators used Planet imagery for research focused on atmospheric clouds and aerosols, polar ice and snow, agriculture and forests. Now that the broader NASA community has access to the data, “it is going to push applications into new areas,” Murphy said.

NASA also obtains imagery from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer on its Terra and Aqua Earth observation satellites and from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite on the NASA-National Oceanic and Atmospheric National Polar-orbiting Partnership and NOAA’s Joint Polar Satellite System.

“We see this [Planet] imagery as a complement to that data,” Murphy said. “The higher spatial resolution allows us to verify some of our global daily products.”

Under the $7 million contract awarded in March but announced April 16, NASA gains access to PlanetScope, the three-meter resolution global imagery captured daily by a constellation of more than 130 cubesats called Doves. In October, Planet unveiled an upgraded version of the satellites called SuperDoves. SuperDoves are designed to capture imagery in eight spectral bands rather than four spectral bands like their predecessors.

“We are really encouraged by NASA leaning forward with a new dataset that complements the imagery they collect and making it available to the scientific community,” said Jen Marcus, operations vice president for Planet Federal, the firm’s subsidiary focused on serving U.S. government customers. “For us as a company founded on the idea of seeing change on the Earth, making decisions based on that and addressing climate change, it’s significant to get our data to more scientists who are looking at that problem.”

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

You may soon be able to ride to the edge of space from Alaska in a Balloon

Image
You may soon be able to ride to the edge of space from Alaska in a Balloon Florida-based startup firm Space Perspective plans to use the Pacific Spaceport Complex in Kodiak to serve as one of the launch sites for the vehicle, called the Spaceship Neptune A company wants to use an advanced balloon to fly customers from Earth’s surface in Alaska to the highest reaches of the planet’s atmosphere. Florida-based startup firm Space Perspective plans to use the Pacific Spaceport Complex in Kodiak to serve as one of the launch sites for the vehicle, called the Spaceship Neptune,  The Anchorage Daily News  reported on Sunday. The balloon rides will be manned by a flight crew taking eight passengers in a pressurized capsule suspended beneath a hydrogen balloon the size of a football stadium. Each passenger could pay an estimated $125,000 for a six-hour journey. Mark Lester, CEO of Alaska Aerospace Corp., said the high-altitude rides will be available from Kodiak in a few years and will ...
Read more

Committee recommends review of planetary protection policies

Image
Committee recommends review of planetary protection policies WASHINGTON — The NASA Advisory Council has recommended that NASA review its existing planetary protection guidelines to balance the needs of science and exploration, an effort that could set the stage for a similar revision at the international level. The council, during a two-day meeting at NASA Headquarters Dec. 10–11, adopted a recommendation calling on NASA to establish an interdisciplinary committee of experts to review the agency’s current requirements for preventing contamination of other worlds by NASA spacecraft as well as any contamination of the Earth by materials brought back from those worlds. “NASA should establish a multidisciplinary task force of experts from industry, the scientific community, and relevant government agencies, to develop U.S. policies that properly balance the legitimate need to protect against the harmful contamination of the Earth or other celestial bodies with the scientific, social, and e...
Read more

Surprise! There's more water on Jupiter than anyone thought

Surprise! There's more water on Jupiter than anyone thought Jupiter  appears to have more water than anyone expected. Newly released data from  NASA's Juno probe shows that water may make up about 0.25% of the molecules in the atmosphere over Jupiter's equator. While that doesn't sound like much, the calculation is based on a prevalence of water's components, hydrogen and oxygen, three times more than at the sun. The new measurements Juno obtained are much higher than a previous mission suggested. The surprise result has scientists delving deep again into results from  NASA's Galileo mission to Jupiter , which obtained drier results in 1995 when engineers deliberately threw the spacecraft into Jupiter's atmosphere. (Galileo was low on fuel and NASA didn't want to take the chance, even if it was a slight one, of the spacecraft accidentally crashing on a potentially habitable icy moon.) Reconciling the results from Galileo and Juno is key for sc...
Read more