Planet Labs reports the successful launch of its 4x Flock, consisting of 44 SuperDove satellites, into orbit on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The company has established contact with all of the SuperDove satellites, many within two minutes of the final deployment, upholding Planet's record of successfully connecting with 100% of all Planet satellites launched.
These 44 satellites will join Planet's existing fleet of roughly 200 satellites in orbit. Planet has now launched 127 satellites across eight launches with SpaceX, and over 500 satellites total since the company's founding 10 years ago. This marks Planet's first launch with SpaceX under their new multi-year, multi-launch rideshare agreement signed in 2021.
Planet's constellations provide daily insights about the Earth's resources and global events. With the latest addition of 44 SuperDove satellites, the company's PlanetScope product will continue to offer customers satellite data captured from the latest and strongest technology. Planet uses just-in-time manufacturing to ensure it can continually innovate the technology onboard their spacecraft before shipment to the launch site.
Planet has built and launched the largest fleet of Earth observation satellites in history. Its fleet of both medium- and high-resolution satellites has collected an unprecedented amount of earth observation data over the last 10 years, creating a deep st ack of 1,700 images on average for every spot on the Earth's landmass.
This allows Planet's customers to not only get the most up-to-date image of their preferred area of interest, but also gives them an extensive set of training data to build artificial intelligence models on.
