That's a tasking model. The satellites can't capture everything, so they get a list of specific regions to observe. In other words, you need to know ahead of ti

That's a tasking model. The satellites can't capture everything, so they get a list of specific regions to observe. In other words, you need to know ahead of time what area you want to observe and you'll tell a satellite to point itself towards that area. Planet's dove constellation is a monitoring model. It's medium resolution (~4m - i.e. you can see a house clearly, but can't reliably see cars), but captures Earth's landmass on a daily basis (modulo cloud cover). In a nutshell, they're different use cases. A tasking model doesn't help you if you need to know what changed in an arbitrary area a week ago. A monitoring model is less useful for something like a port, where you know you'll want to always image it.