At Planet Labs, we’re on a mission to image the whole world, every day and provide universal access to it. We think the fresh and frequently updated, global imagery can help humanity to take better care of the planet and life upon it, as well as create myriad new commercial opportunities.

Today we are releasing a sample image gallery, downlinked from our newest fleet of satellites, or “Doves” as we call them. This set was launched on 19th June from Yasny, Russia, on board the Dnepr rocket. These images are a small sample, just the tip of the iceberg, of data streaming down continuously — shared in the spirit of stimulating your thinking on what this imagery could be used for. One of the key features that frequent images enables is detection of change. To help illustrate that, we’ve added sliders to some images to compare with Landsat satellite imagery from the same month of the previous year.

As the data stream in each hour, the responses of our team vary from awe, to curiosity, to surprise. There is beauty in the ships steaming along the Suez Canal, constant amazement at the rapidity of infrastructure development in China, and sobering reality upon observing the impact of drought in our home state of California.

I wanted to share some of my personal favourites:

Water & Coffee



Image © 2014 Planet Labs Inc.

Landsat, July 2013

Mining & Power

Infrastructure & Urbanisation



Image © 2014 Planet Labs Inc.

Landsat, August 2013

Fires & Forests

The images hint at the breadth of use cases latent in a fresh, global imagery dataset. Although no magic bullet, we hope these Doves will go some way in helping us to collectively take care of our beautiful spaceship Earth! Enjoy the rest of the sample imagery, and check back here soon.