NASA awards Planet $7 million Earth imagery contract

SAN FRANCISCO – NASA employees, contractors and teams working on NASA-funded research 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 began purchasing 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 and data were valuable but sometimes struggled with licenses that prevented data sharing or publication of research.

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 option, NASA gains access to PlanetScope, the three-meter resolution global imagery captured daily by a constellation of more than 130 cubesats called Doves. Planet announced plans in October to begin launching Super Doves to capture imagery in eight spectral bands rather than four spectral bands like their predecessors.

NASA’s contract with Planet includes options to extend data buys through September 2023.

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