On January 13, 2022, Planet‘s Flock 4x, consisting of 44 SuperDove satellites, was successfully launched into orbit on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
These 44 satellites will join our existing fleet of roughly 200 satellites in orbit. SpaceX has now brought to orbit a total of 127 Planet satellites across eight launches. This marks our first launch with SpaceX under our new multi-year, multi-launch rideshare agreement that was signed in 2021.
Planet was able to establish contact with all of the SuperDove satellites, many within two minutes of the final deployment, upholding the firm’s record of successfully connecting with 100% of all launched Planet satellites.
Planet’s constellations provide daily insights about the Earth’s resources and global events. With the latest addition of 44 SuperDove satellites, the firm’s PlanetScope product will continue to offer customers satellite data captured from the latest and strongest technology. Just-in-time used to ensure we can continuous technology innovations are incorporated into Planet spacecraft before they are shipped to the launch site.
To date, Planet has built and launched the largest fleet of Earth Observation (EO) satellites in history. The company’s fleet of both medium- and high-resolution satellites have collected an unprecedented amount of EO data over the last 10 years, creating a deep stack of 1,700 images on average for every spot on the Earth’s landmass. This allows customers to obtain the most up-to-date image of their preferred area of interest as well as gives them an extensive set of training data for the building of artificial intelligence (AI) models.
Planet’s teams are already fast at work on the next satellites and data services to enhance the constellation.