Inside Planet Labs’ new satellite manufacturing site
Satellite imaging and analytics company Planet is taking the wraps off
its new manufacturing space in San Francisco. Founded by ex-NASA
employees, Planet is leveraging some of the $183 million in funding it’s
amassed to expand. In the basement of a nondescript office building in
the middle of Harrison Street in San Francisco, Planet is hard at work
building low-orbit satellites that take images of our changing planet,
and now the aerospace imaging company has more room to do so, claiming
that the new facility is the most prolific satellite manufacturing spot
in the world.
Inside the new 27,000-square-foot manufacturing site are
satellite-building stations where Planet engineers piece together
“doves,” as the machines are called. The new site is six times the size
of their old factory, and with that new space Planet claims its
engineers will produce up to 40 satellites/week. Fluorescent panels
illuminate the industrial work stations, and the small satellites sit
plugged into their “dove nests.”
Planet says their satellites can be built using only 10 tools
The way Planet builds satellites is different from how NASA or Lockheed
Martin does. Planet operates off the idea that instead of building
large, cumbersome machines that sit in space taking images with outdated
technology and old sensors, many smaller satellites with a one to
three-year lifespan can get the job done faster and provide better
images of the Earth’s surface. With the new site, Planet will bring all
aspects of spacecraft production — from R&D to manufacturing to
testing — under one roof.
So what exactly do these satellites do? Each satellite can take two
images per second, and Planet’s systems then work to classify images as
water, coral, rivers, roads, infrastructure and forests.
Doves in the dove nest
Planet’s philosophy is that “you can’t fix what you can’t see.” Partners
in the defense, humanities and agriculture sectors are using data from
Planet’s satellite fleet for projects like classifying deforestation in
Brazil and detecting urban change in Tanzania. The satellites derive
images from lesser traveled parts of the planet. The imaging systems
have gathered data on the destruction of roads in Syria, and even
recently detected the sudden appearance of a chemical lab in North
Korea. One partner is using Planet data to measure coral reef
destruction in Australia.
In the past, Planet has worked with launch partners like SpaceX.
However, this first fleet of satellites manufactured in the new facility
will be shipped out to India for launch on the PSLV rocket next month.
In four years, Planet has launched 298 satellites, 150 of which are
currently in orbit collecting over 300 million square kilometers of
imagery daily.
Join Geezgo for free. Use Geezgo's end-to-end encrypted Chat with your Closenets (friends, relatives, colleague etc) in personalized ways.>>
No comments