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Non long ago, an Indian rocket company launched a record 104 meaty microsatellites into low-earth orbit. Eighty-eight of them had the same directive: map the whole globe, every day, for a company called Planet. To practice that, Planet needs quite a constellation of satellites. But now 149 of them are in operational LEO, and they've already started mapping and stitching together image tiles of vast swaths of Earth.

Using Planet Explorer Beta, you can scroll through and see how areas of state accept changed over the last twelve months, in monthly snapshots. The company has built an automated system that processes the visible-spectrum data collected by its satellites, selects the all-time frames, and stitches them together into a mosaic.

The entire earth is bachelor for viewing at a resolution of thirty to 40 meters on a side. The Us gets special attention: information technology'southward being imaged at three- to v-meter resolution. That means you can pick out buildings, roads, and even tiny features like trees or individual cars.

"This basemap is a game changer," says National Geographic cartographer Rosemary Wardley of the service. She said having upward-to-engagement imagery at such a high resolution is a "tremendous nugget, non merely to the field of cartography but for science as a whole."

The daily prototype updates will exist reserved for Planet'southward paid clients, which include agronomical and mapping companies and government agencies. If y'all're willing to sign upward for an Explorer account, you'll be able to run across the daily snapshots they make bachelor for the state of California. The coverage in CA isn't nevertheless complete, but it's frequent enough to catch recent developments like the flooding of ingather fields near Gilroy and the swelling of a reservoir behind the Oroville Dam that recently caused so much havoc.

Planet is the brainchild of former NASA luminary Will Marshall, who founded Planet Labs with a group of other ex-NASA scientists. Hither's his description of the programme'southward goals, from a recent web log post announcing the beta service:

The goal of Planet Explorer is to enable users, both commercial and humanitarian, to browse the imagery we have and empathize how it tin can meet their needs. Nosotros hope this will lead to more commercial partnerships and ensure humanitarian benefits are enabled. Nosotros also hope it will change the way people recollect about satellite imagery.

What is surprising to me is that in virtually every image we collect, when we compare it to a previous image, nosotros see some level of change: a reservoir level drains, a tree is cut downward, a field is harvested. People think of the Earth equally static because we've been trained on static maps. In reality, Earth has never been static; it's e'er changing and imagery of our planet should reverberate that.

Marshall notes the service isn't in perfect shape withal — at that place are some colour anomalies, prototype tilting, and in some cases, no information is available for a specific area. Nonetheless, he hopes to evolve the service from its current beta into a new fashion to rails twenty-four hours-by-24-hour interval changes on and around planet Earth.