It’s official. Planet is acquiring Google’s satellite business, formerly known as Skybox which it acquired for $500M in 2014. Google also signed up for a long-term data purchasing agreement. Kudos to Will Marshall, David Oppenheimer and team for successfully concluding a complex negotiation!
Planet now spans the gamut from high-frequency global coverage to high-resolution and multispectral detail. More to come. On Valentine’s Day, they will launch 88 more satellites and will image every meter of the planet every day….a 50 trillion pixel daily image of Earth, coming soon.
Can’t wait for the daily tree count for planet Earth. For a sense of the transparency and humanitarian applications, you can see how they tracked growth of the refugee camps in Uganda.
Today’s announcement is good timing for our presentations at the SmallSat symposium on Tuesday.
News reporting from The Atlantic, Financial Times
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