Planet Labs

The company’s fleet of  200 CubeSats now captures around 1.4 million images of the Earth per day, covering a geography roughly double the size of North America. The data is fed back to 30 ground stations around the world that governments and private companies use for everything from monitoring the health of crops to creating risk models for flood zones. Planet’s goal is to increase the area of coverage until its cameras are capturing a snapshot of the entire globe each day. That massive amount of data requires development of new object-recognition capabilities that, if successful, would allow Planet to index physical changes on Earth the way Google indexes the internet.