At the 2021 Planetary Exploration User Conference, Planet officially announced that it will launch two programs: the next-generation ultra-high-resolution satellite constellation - Pelican (Pelican) and the SAR-assisted Planet product fusion monitoring service - Fusion with SAR.
Pelican, a next-generation super-high-resolution satellite constellation scheduled to launch next year and put into service in 2023, will complement and upgrade the Skysat high-resolution constellation that Planet completed last year. When fully operational, it will exceed SKYSAT's market-leading global intra-day revisit frequency of up to 10 times, with higher temporal resolution, shorter reaction times and delays, and the ability to track and monitor dynamic changes in ground objectsAt the same time, the increased resolution of Pelican makes it easy to identify details such as road markings. Combined with Planet's full suite of day-to-day global monitoring data and analytics solutions, Pelican provides unrivalled awareness and decision-making capabilities to users around the world working in areas such as sustainability, finance, insurance, and more.
At its user conference last year, Planet proposed a unique solution, "Fusion Monitoring". The technology combines daily acquisition of global PlanetScope imagery with other datasets to provide an uninterrupted resource of interest products to interested customers. This year, they will incorporate SAR data into their converged monitoring services on this basis, taking full advantage of its cloud-penetrating and fog-permeable capabilities to compensate for the interference caused by clouds and weather on optical image acquisition (Figure 2). In this way, Planet is better able to provide continuous monitoring of the surface and assist users in decision-making. In addition, in the emergency response to key events such as flood disasters and floods, it can effectively solve the problem of rapid acquisition of images, and provide data resources for disaster impact assessment and emergency rescue work.