Planet Labs PBC Releases Images From Pelican-2

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Planet Labs PBC (NYSE: PL), a leading provider of daily data and insights about Earth, today released first light images from its Pelican-2 satellite of the Port of Laem Chabang in Eastern Thailand, the primary deep sea port in Thailand. They were taken on March 12, 2025, from an altitude of around 506 km. Pelican-2 launched on SpaceX’s Transporter-12 Rideshare mission on January 14, 2025.

“We’re super pleased with our Pelican-2 first light imagery. The spacecraft is exceeding expectations and is rising to meet the market needs of our customers,” said Will Marshall, Co-Founder and CEO of Planet. “Our Pelican fleet offers greater capacity, higher resolution, lower latency, and, with NVIDIA’s most powerful chip onboard, Pelican will be able to do AI processing at the edge. This integration of AI-powered solutions with our precise spatial data is a major leap forward, and is an exciting preview of what’s to come for commercial satellite imagery data in the years ahead.”

Pelican-2 joins Pelican-1 (a smallsat platform tech demonstration launched last year) as part of Planet’s next-generation, high-resolution fleet to support and expand its existing SkySat capabilities. Pelican-2 provides high resolution imagery by leveraging 6 multispectral bands that are optimized for cross-sensor analysis with PlanetScope. Pelican-2 will support Planet’s 50 cm tasked imagery product line and is engineered to produce 40 cm class imagery.

Planet has collaborated with NVIDIA to equip Pelican-2 with the NVIDIA Jetson platform to power on-orbit computing—with the aim of vastly reducing the time between data capture and value for customers. Additional imagery with an increased resolution is expected to be available following the lowering of the spacecraft to its operational altitude and once the spacecraft and the imagery pipelines complete ongoing commissioning and calibration work. Planet plans to launch additional Pelicans this year.

“I’m deeply proud of the Pelican team that made this achievement possible. The data we’re getting back from the early stages of our Pelican-2 satellite proves the technical maturity of this new system, and is a testament to their hard work,” said Brian Lewis, Mission Director, Pelican. “Pelican’s ability to reduce downlink latency while improving our image quality and capabilities will help ensure our customers and partners have a seamless tasking experience and can consistently monitor critical changes happening on the ground. This is just the beginning of the high-resolution imagery we plan to more rapidly provide, and we can’t wait to make these capabilities available for a wide range of use cases – from defense and intelligence monitoring to disaster response and more.”

More information on Pelican-2’s capabilities can be found here.

About Planet Labs PBC

Planet is a leading provider of global, daily satellite imagery and geospatial solutions. Planet is driven by a mission to image the world every day, and make change visible, accessible and actionable. Founded in 2010 by three NASA scientists, Planet designs, builds, and operates the largest Earth observation fleet of imaging satellites. Planet provides mission-critical data, advanced insights, and software solutions to approximately 1,000 customers, comprising the world’s leading agriculture, forestry, intelligence, education and finance companies and government agencies, enabling users to simply and effectively derive unique value from satellite imagery. Planet is a public benefit corporation listed on the New York Stock Exchange as PL. To learn more visit www.planet.com and follow us on X (formerly Twitter).

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