24 ms·

Planet: Imaging the entire Earth every day

464 points by NaOH 7y ago

safwan 7y ago
Are we moving to the Chrome only world?
- mikaelsouza 7y ago
  Do you mind to share which browser you're using? It's working fine for me on Firefox.
  - the_pwner224 7y ago
    When I load it, the website states that the simulation does not work on Firefox + Linux. Works fine for me when I re-opened it in Falkon (WebKit-based). Edit: another responder to the parent comment said it works for them on Firefox dev edition on Arch Linux. I'm using Nightly on Arch and it gives the message stated above. With a UA switcher set to Chrome Windows, it loads but renders the image strips on the map as black stripes instead of 'textured' ones. Interesting...
  - mikedilger 7y ago
    Works for me on firefox-developer-edition. Does not work on vanilla chromium. ArchLinux.
- testrun 7y ago
  Working fine for me, Firefox 68.0.1 and Ubuntu 19.04
  - _navaneethan 7y ago
    Works for me as well. I love firefox!
    - kzrdude 7y ago
      Works on Firefox/Android too v68.0
- intc 7y ago
  Works fine on UXP (git commit 5a957202b70a0b11078b0cffa8967b63baff5661) / Gentoo Linux.
- snek 7y ago
  Using a UA switcher and FF, I can't seem to find anything broken. I think the author of this page is just a bit zealous for chrome. It also seems to work without UA switcher, but still states it won't work. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - cgriswald 7y ago
    Perhaps the modern equivalent of “best viewed in Netscape”?
- SenHeng 7y ago
  Works in Safari.
- undefinedFoo 7y ago
  Works for me in Firefox 68.0.1 in Win10, kinda slow tho but it might be because of my hardware setup.
- meigwilym 7y ago
  Doesn't work for me either. Ubuntu 18.04.3 and Firefox 68.0.1. The console gives this error: "TypeError: m is null".
garmaine 7y ago
Can’t see anything on the globe, just a circle.
- parsimo2010 7y ago
  Portions of the Earth appear as white dots orbit and the Earth rotates underneath. It works in Chrome but not Firefox for me. It's worth spending 10 seconds looking at, but I feel like I wasted some time opening up two browsers to check compatibility.
- dmix 7y ago
  On mobile it says to use desktop to see all the of the pictures which I can confirm there's way more. Edit: checking the source code it only shows "20% of the photos" on mobile The visual below shows the locations <span class="small-data-note">of 20%</span> of the photos
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- mnw21cam 7y ago
  Can't even see a circle.
mrhappyunhappy 7y ago
So many questions: 1. How did they get 150 satellites into low orbit? 2. Is it becoming a hazard to have all the satellites and space junk possibly making it difficult to launch anything down the road? 3. Aside from tracking the objects, has anyone made any calculations as to when these things will become a hazard?
- roywiggins 7y ago
  They are launched in groups. Lots of them are really small. https://nbremer.github.io/planet-constellations/ https://nbremer.github.io/planet-constellations/
- kartikkumar 7y ago
  1. They launched by piggybacking on rockets that were launching larger satellites. For instance, they launched 88 on this record-setting PSLV launch: https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2017/02/indias-pslv-record-104-satellites/ https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2017/02/indias-pslv-record-1... 2. People generally have a poor understanding of how vast space is. Congestion in specific low-Earth orbits is definitely a concern, but the devil is in the details. For instance, launching to Sun-Synchronous orbit (SSO) [1] above ~600 km is considered to pose significant risk to on-orbit assets, because of how many satellites are in SSO and the kinetic energy their carry, however to really assess the risk, you need to do a lot of detailed population studies (I've done some of this stuff). In a nutshell, launching more satellites can be generally considered to increase risk of on-orbit collision and fragmentation, but quantifying it requires a lot of maths and physics. 3. Yes! There's is extensive and on-going research on this topic. Most people know the Kessler Syndrome [2], but honestly space debris research goes a lot further than that. This review by J.-C. Liou is a great starting point: https://commons.erau.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1233&context=stm https://commons.erau.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1233&co... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
- mirashii 7y ago
  1. Many of these satellites are cubesats. They hitch rides as secondary payloads on launches, and in batches. In Planet's case, they've launched many batches, some as large as 20-48 satellites. 2. Not really. Kessler syndrome is the general name for this phenomenon, but it's not a huge concern in LEO. In LEO, there is enough atmospheric drag to naturally deorbit spacecraft. For US based companies, regulations mandate that they have a deorbit plan within 25 years. For most cubesats, their orbits are low enough that they'll naturally deorbit within 5-7 years. 3. Most people generally think that any hazard in LEO will not be caused by launching more objects, but by having objects collide (or having some weaponry intentionally explode objects) causing debris that is spread more widely and too small to track. Currently JSpOC in the US tracks most objects the size of a baseball or larger in LEO and coordinates with various commercial and private entities to put into place plans for collision avoidance where possible.
dmix 7y ago
> Parts of the landmass can also be missing due to complete cloud cover that day. See the Amazon, Central Africa, or Northern Australia for example. Aka great places to start a terrorist or drug organization! The invasion of Iraq got delayed by a few days due to cloud coverage. It would definitely impede surveillance to have clouds often blocking satellites.
- kartikkumar 7y ago
  This is where SAR imagery comes into play [1]. There are a few SAR constellations online and being worked on that are shifting the discussion about what we can track [2][3]. [1] https://medium.com/from-the-macroscope/its-always-sunny-at-orbital-insight-our-work-with-sar-imagery-9907c850fe45 https://medium.com/from-the-macroscope/its-always-sunny-at-o... [2] https://www.iceye.com https://www.iceye.com [3] https://synspective.com https://synspective.com
tilolebo 7y ago
I worked for RapidEye during the launch in 2008. Exciting times! If I remember correctly, their planned lifetime for imaging was 7 years, so it's quite amazing that they're still active 11 years later.
Dansvidania 7y ago
this is incredibly cool. Thanks for sharing! The picture of Monte Fitz Roy is breath-taking. Is there any way to access more of the pictures?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- objectiveotter 7y ago
  Check out: https://medium.com/planet-stories/earths-wonders-like-you-ve-never-seen-them-before-ac9e2f39aa56 https://medium.com/planet-stories/earths-wonders-like-you-ve...
  - shpx 7y ago
    Mecca from space: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPgU5OYpwCs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPgU5OYpwCs
samstave 7y ago
test --- Why cant I comment on the other thread abt construction workers' suicides.. this is what I attempted to post: --- >Why do so many construction workers kill themselves? They got tired of building the future. --- On . serious note, construction is a thankless, shitty job. My dad was a general contractor, and he had an employee, who just had a baby... He took the baby to the neighbors house and asked them to "watch her for an hour" -- he then went back to his house and shot his wife, then killed himself. murder/suicide.... I think that baby was like 3-months old. --- Construction workers earn shit, are treated like shit and have REALLY physically demanding jobs. so their stress levels are HIGH. I think that the idea of Universal Basic Income shouls aplly TO ONLY CERTAIN INDUSTRIES. --- If you work in a certain field, which is a service field (basically) -- then yes you should get UBI - but if youre not contributing to society in any form - then no UBI for you. ______ I know its against ethos on HN to bitch about down-votes. BUT FUCK ANYONE WHO DOWNVOTED THIS COMMENT Construction is a thanklessm low-paying, high stress job and I shared an intimate story of a person I knew personally as an employee of my dad's construction company fucking killing his wife after having a baby... So FUCK you downvoters -- you fucking assholes that think that deep matters cant be discussed on HN. Check my account age... ive been around the block.
omeid2 7y ago
"This visualization doesn't work right on Firefox+Linux, sorry! You could try Chrome/Chromium instead." No Thanks.
- winrid 7y ago
  Chromium doesn't have all that tracking stuff right. What's wrong with it?
  - TekMol 7y ago
    Not true. Chromium talks a lot to Googles servers. Additionally, "websites" that are made for chrome drive even more people into this monoculture which is bad for the web.
    - mda 7y ago
      What does it send? Any proof of shady behavior?
    - isostatic 7y ago
      Monoculture was bad when it was IE6, it's good when it's google. At least that's the SV Groupthink.
    - winrid 7y ago
      Did not know that.
  - guardian5x 7y ago
    When Microsoft took the Chromium browser as a base for the new Edge version, they replaced over 50 Google services. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/8/18300772/microsoft-google-services-removed-changed-chromium-edge-browser https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/8/18300772/microsoft-google-...
    - mda 7y ago
      And they replace them with their stuff? You imply foul play but there is nothing in the list.
Dunedan 7y ago
"Omega tau" made a really nice podcast a while ago about how Planet Labs is approaching Earth observation. That podcast goes into the details how the company and the satellite constellation came to be and what novel approaches they're using. Definitely worth listening: http://omegataupodcast.net/204-earth-observation-at-planet-labs/ http://omegataupodcast.net/204-earth-observation-at-planet-l...
- azernik 7y ago
  This is fascinating - especially the talks about the advantages of using COTS electronics. Once upon a time, the latest and greatest in electronics was produced by military, scientific, and spaceflight applications, with commercial uses being spinoffs that were often up to a decade behind. Now the situation is reversed; consumer electronics are where the innovation is happening, and military/space systems are finding ways to repurpose that technology.
  - kartikkumar 7y ago
    There's actually strong synergy. There's a lot of spin-in and spin-out going on between space and non-space sectors. COTS and general commodization of "discete units" (parts, subsystems, assemblies, etc.) is one of the biggest drivers for the commercialization of space. It's enabling people to move towards the use of advanced manufacturing techniques, cutting lead time and cost, and enabling batch production. We recently published an article on how manufacturing lines are changing in the space industry, inspired by best practices in mature commercial sectors like the auto industry: https://blog.satsearch.co/2019-08-08-demystifying-auto-industry-inspired-assembly-lines-in-the-space-industry.html https://blog.satsearch.co/2019-08-08-demystifying-auto-indus... We see a lot of this happening through our website: https://satsearch.co https://satsearch.co. We're effectively building a B2B marketplace because of this specific change in the way supply chains are being architected. Disclosure: I'm one of the co-founders at satsearch.
  - branchan 7y ago
    I think this is only true for small LEO spacecrafts that are more or less 'disposable'. For higher cost GEO and interplanetary spacecraft, consumer electronics are not going to be hardened sufficiently and flight-proven to be used in those applications.
tunesmith 7y ago
I can't believe I've never wondered this before, but I wonder how possible it is to deliberately create a satellite-blocking cloud above one's own property. What height and size it would have to be, etc.
- mbrumlow 7y ago
  If you could track the satellite could you not shine a laser, or bright light (maybe a mirror reflecting the sun) directly at the camera to mess up the imaging while over your region?
  - haditab 7y ago
    And if an aircraft flies over your property you could get charged with a federal offense (pointing a laser at an aircraft).
    - hanniabu 7y ago
      Ehhhh, the aircraft flew into the trajectory, are there no other comparable scenarios where there's an intersection that can happen accidentally?
      - tonyarkles 7y ago
        Basically, if you're planning on pointing a laser into the sky, you need at a minimum issue a NOTAM to inform aviators of the hazard. Things like outdoor concerts and some weather observation systems do this. But... Sending a laser into the sky and intersecting an aircraft that was operating per regulation? That's on the laser-er, and "creating a hazard to aviation" is not a charge that you'll be happy dealing with in many countries.
        the_seraphim 7y ago
        sending a NOTAM isnt hard... you could put in a permenant notam. Also you wouldnt need a laser just a really bright searchlight
os7borne 7y ago
Stupid question: how do they measure speed of the satellite? I mean, on the website they've mentioned the speed of one of their satellite as ~7.6 kmps. Is that the actual speed of the satellite or it's a measure of how much land the the satellite covers per second?
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  They can measure it by altitude. An orbiting object always has a defined velocity at any point of its orbit. For example, a circular orbit 500km above Earth's surface amounts to velocity of 7.61 km/s everywhere on it.
  - os7borne 7y ago
    Makes sense. This is helpful. Thanks, TeMPOral!
- mrtnmcc 7y ago
  The orbital velocity and the ground track velocity only differ by about 6.6% for their 450km orbit, so it's not a big difference. But because they have a relatively circular orbit, you can use the formula sqrt(G*M/R) which gives 7.639km/sec -- so it looks like they are referring to true orbital velocity.
  - os7borne 7y ago
    This is helpful, thanks!
- loneranger_11x 7y ago
  Not an expert. But there are a few ways to look at this. Bodies that are in stable orbit can have only a specific velocity which is a function of its distance from & mass of whatever it is orbiting. So orbiting satellite's speed can be inferred from its orbital height. There are ground based tracking stations that can technically measure the speed of any orbiting body. Also read somewhere that LEO satellites could use GPS receivers to get a fix on their position. measuring change in this position also gives velocity. There a bunch of limiting conditions around max-height and velocity for this to work though.
mkagenius 7y ago
Lot of blind spots (straight stips), are they covered in next satellite revolutions?
mkagenius 7y ago
Isn't this like rolling shutter ? But I don't see any stretching of the maps.
Rebelgecko 7y ago
Cool visualization. Would be neat if we could rotate the globe
NietTim 7y ago
Can we receive the signal from these satellites ourselves like we can with the NOAA satellites?
- azernik 7y ago
  Telemetry, probably; imagery, definitely not. (They sell this imagery, it's not public information like NOAA data.)
  - ivanhoe 7y ago
    Do you mean that imagery can't be received for some technical reason (like being encrypted) or that it would be illegal to save it as it's copyrighted?
    - azernik 7y ago
      The former - encryption is cheap and lost revenue is expensive.
  - patrickyeon 7y ago
    Telemetry and command and control signals are also encrypted.
- NietTim 7y ago
  Here's an article with much more technical talk then I could quickly find on Planet.com's website about one of their first flocks: https://directory.eoportal.org/web/eoportal/satellite-missions/f/flock-1 https://directory.eoportal.org/web/eoportal/satellite-missio... (only tonight have time to read it all)
yuuki1224 7y ago
that's great
dougmwne 7y ago
You can access their monthly imagery for free by creating an account at planet.com. I use it to track the progress of infrastructure and other land development projects near me. You can also create time lapse animations of a particular area, which is a super fun way to watch a road or a highway being built.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- bainsfather 7y ago
  What is he resolution like? Is it as good as Google's aerial imagery that they show with their maps? (or Bing's)
  - dougmwne 7y ago
    No way, not even close. At this point Google is doing overhead lidar flights to get incredibly details 3d maps. The Planet imagry is like going back several decades in satellite tech. But on the other hand, it's daily.
    - gjstein 7y ago
      Do you have a source for "overhead LIDAR flights"? I was under the impression that data was coming almost exclusively from their StreetView cars (with perhaps a few companies that provide helicopter-based data from time to time). True enough though that Google has a staggering amount of data about the earth.
      - dougmwne 7y ago
        My apologies. I remembered incorrectly. The aerial flights use computer vision to extract depth maps. While aerial LIDAR is used in GIS, I could not find LIDAR mentioned connected with Google's aerial imagery. https://blog.google/products/earth/google-earths-incredible-3d-imagery-explained/ https://blog.google/products/earth/google-earths-incredible-...
softwarelimits 7y ago
Absolutely great, I am sure we will need these kind of visualizations to survive. But the planet needs a JavaScript programming competition with the challenge of minimizing CPU load of such fantastic presentations. It would be so good to have one golden path to browser animations with the lowest energy consumption, one default framework that will be easy to use without deep knowledge of browser quirks and JavaScript optimization tricks. We are wasting too much time.
- KuhlMensch 7y ago
  Well, I would say, what we need and have is a rich ecosystem of JavaScript applications, which can and does guide both libraries and browser development. I'd say we need, the start-stop and often out-of-step (i.e. careful and experimental) shuffle toward standards. WebGL is just the latest waltz, but that visualisation is built on a bunch of foundational standards: TCP, HTTP, HTTPS, OpenGL, WebGL, etc etc The computers that got us to the moon where highly efficient integrated circuits. But (I presume) they can't get us to mars. Personally I'd advocate for messy, but rich platforms, which max out our CPUs in some applications; but give expression to the emergent desires of those who want to tinker. We don't have time to miss-out on potential wins by working with rigid systems.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
smartera 7y ago
Anyone familiar the pricing structure of Planet? I couldn't find that on their website.
- groundlogic 7y ago
  This paper contains some pricing from mid 2018 (including Planet/Dove): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326417596_Benchmark_of_Satellites_Image_Services_for_Precision_Agricultural_use https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326417596_Benchmark...
VoidWhisperer 7y ago
The visualization also does not show up with the 'Dark Reader' extension on, which is kind of odd.
chewbacha 7y ago
Welp, the final vestiges of privacy feel like they are being removed.
crazygringo 7y ago
Super cool! I wonder why both clouds and ocean show up as black instead of as actual white and blue imagery respectively. Are they saving money and bandwidth by not sending back "useless" imagery? Or something else?
- slenk 7y ago
  Pretty sure its black because they don't image them as its a waste of bandwidth
- jofer 7y ago
  Most cubesats have small solar panels and can't image all the time (i.e. they need to charge and then image). Mostly likely there no imaging at all over the oceans so the satellites can charge.
- patrickyeon 7y ago
  (I used to work at planet, this is my recollection of what was the case then) Usually, for ocean-sized bodies of water, we'd stop imaging entirely to reduce power load and align the solar panels with the sun. Effectively all of the ocean had nothing going on on the surface that we could image anyway. When Planet gets the imagery, they have a fairly good sense of where it is, but it is still processed to get it to align with ground truth, which is called rectification and relies on matching visible features to known ground features. If the entire image is clouds, this can't work and they don't publish the image because they can't say exactly where it is. Also, there's not really usable information in that imagery I guess.
  - shpx 7y ago
    You could track container ships, in fact they're probably so easy to detect you could run a small computer vision model on the satellite and only transmit those photos. Obviously the most interesting container ships are the ones that you can see from space but don't show up on marine trackers. Although I don't know how you turn that information into money. Actually someone must already be doing this, Airbus sponsored a Kaggle competition for detecting ships in satellite imagery https://www.kaggle.com/c/airbus-ship-detection https://www.kaggle.com/c/airbus-ship-detection and maybe that's how they caught that Iranian oil tanker last month.
whatshisface 7y ago
For the people commenting on the Firefox+Linux issue: it doesn't work for me, and this is the error I get: >Refused to create native OpenGL context because of blacklist entry: FEATURE_FAILURE_OLD_NVIDIA So the real combination is Old NVIDIA drivers + Linux + Firefox. (Maybe not even Firefox, the issue might be inseparable from my old card. I'm not going to try it on Chromium.) The question is, why is my card blacklisted? I think it might be because of a security vulnerability that Chrome hasn't patched.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- arch-ninja 7y ago
  Agreed, I have an intel embedded thingamabob and it works fine. I wonder if there's a software rendering option in FF that will make it work?
  - ngngngng 7y ago
    Works for me as well, embedded graphics ubuntu and firefox
samirm 7y ago
I hope they start imaging at least parts of the ocean, like the great pacific garbage patch and other areas of particular interest for meteorologists and environmentalists.
- rootusrootus 7y ago
  I thought the garbage patch is not visible to the naked eye, mostly made up of microscopic particles, and especially not to a satellite with a 3m resolution?
  - jayess 7y ago
    That's correct, it's something like four particles per cubic meter. > "fingernail-sized or smaller bits of plastic", often microscopic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch
  - kleer001 7y ago
    I imagine it should still slightly alter the appearance of the water. Check out "Eulerian Video Magnification" for more.
    - schoen 7y ago
      That work is awesome, but don't they need changes over time in order to achieve the magnification? How would you get changes over time with the plastic pollution in order to view it this way?
      - kleer001 7y ago
        Use frames from the same area over a span of time.... What's confusing? There's a picture taken every day. If you're worried about the time span between the frames, I'm certain that shouldn't matter to the algorithm, it's just more noise and maybe the result takes longer to get..
- branchan 7y ago
nico 7y ago
Really cool visualization! Talking about visualizing Earth. Does anyone know of alternative visualizations/projections of Earth (other than globes and maps)? For example, what would it look like if we could image Earth, entirely, from pole to pole, continuously, like a panoramic picture? (imagine the result as an impossibly wide picture that starts with one pole on the left and ends with the opposite pole on the right) Thank you.
- gregsadetsky 7y ago
  I don't think that this is exactly what you're asking for, but you can explore most "standard" projections below (definitely try out the first link described below): - Take a look at [0], click "Earth" in the lower left corner, then try other projections (they appear as the "A", "CE", "E", etc. list). Drag the map around to set the projection's "center". The real time projection calculations are pretty amazing..! - Go to [1] and toggle all of the categories ("Wall Maps", "Maps of Hemispheres", etc.) by clicking them. The maps are not dynamic / cannot be dragged around (like [0]), but this is a more complete reference list (similar to Wikipedia's list of map projections [2]). The rest of the site is also absolutely incredible (I recommend taking ~1 hour to go through the whole list of projects one by one). [0] https://earth.nullschool.net/ https://earth.nullschool.net/ [1] http://www.radicalcartography.net/index.html?projectionref http://www.radicalcartography.net/index.html?projectionref [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_map_projections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_map_projections
anotheryou 7y ago
Really cool tech! I wanted to apply for a job there, but in the end didn't because of their undisclosed military clients.
f137 7y ago
I do not see daily updates on planet.com, at least for the free trial account I just created, and for my location (Eastern Europe). For example, there is a damb nearby which was completed a few months ago, but is shown half-built in their map.

464 points by NaOH 7y ago

safwan 7y ago

Are we moving to the Chrome only world?

mikaelsouza 7y ago
Do you mind to share which browser you're using? It's working fine for me on Firefox.
- the_pwner224 7y ago
  When I load it, the website states that the simulation does not work on Firefox + Linux. Works fine for me when I re-opened it in Falkon (WebKit-based). Edit: another responder to the parent comment said it works for them on Firefox dev edition on Arch Linux. I'm using Nightly on Arch and it gives the message stated above. With a UA switcher set to Chrome Windows, it loads but renders the image strips on the map as black stripes instead of 'textured' ones. Interesting...
- mikedilger 7y ago
  Works for me on firefox-developer-edition. Does not work on vanilla chromium. ArchLinux.
testrun 7y ago
Working fine for me, Firefox 68.0.1 and Ubuntu 19.04
- _navaneethan 7y ago
  Works for me as well. I love firefox!
  - kzrdude 7y ago
    Works on Firefox/Android too v68.0
intc 7y ago
Works fine on UXP (git commit 5a957202b70a0b11078b0cffa8967b63baff5661) / Gentoo Linux.
snek 7y ago
Using a UA switcher and FF, I can't seem to find anything broken. I think the author of this page is just a bit zealous for chrome. It also seems to work without UA switcher, but still states it won't work. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- cgriswald 7y ago
  Perhaps the modern equivalent of “best viewed in Netscape”?
SenHeng 7y ago
Works in Safari.
undefinedFoo 7y ago
Works for me in Firefox 68.0.1 in Win10, kinda slow tho but it might be because of my hardware setup.
meigwilym 7y ago
Doesn't work for me either. Ubuntu 18.04.3 and Firefox 68.0.1. The console gives this error: "TypeError: m is null".

garmaine 7y ago

Can’t see anything on the globe, just a circle.

parsimo2010 7y ago
Portions of the Earth appear as white dots orbit and the Earth rotates underneath. It works in Chrome but not Firefox for me. It's worth spending 10 seconds looking at, but I feel like I wasted some time opening up two browsers to check compatibility.
dmix 7y ago
On mobile it says to use desktop to see all the of the pictures which I can confirm there's way more. Edit: checking the source code it only shows "20% of the photos" on mobile The visual below shows the locations <span class="small-data-note">of 20%</span> of the photos
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
mnw21cam 7y ago
Can't even see a circle.

mrhappyunhappy 7y ago

So many questions: 1. How did they get 150 satellites into low orbit? 2. Is it becoming a hazard to have all the satellites and space junk possibly making it difficult to launch anything down the road? 3. Aside from tracking the objects, has anyone made any calculations as to when these things will become a hazard?

roywiggins 7y ago
They are launched in groups. Lots of them are really small. https://nbremer.github.io/planet-constellations/ https://nbremer.github.io/planet-constellations/
kartikkumar 7y ago
1. They launched by piggybacking on rockets that were launching larger satellites. For instance, they launched 88 on this record-setting PSLV launch: https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2017/02/indias-pslv-record-104-satellites/ https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2017/02/indias-pslv-record-1... 2. People generally have a poor understanding of how vast space is. Congestion in specific low-Earth orbits is definitely a concern, but the devil is in the details. For instance, launching to Sun-Synchronous orbit (SSO) [1] above ~600 km is considered to pose significant risk to on-orbit assets, because of how many satellites are in SSO and the kinetic energy their carry, however to really assess the risk, you need to do a lot of detailed population studies (I've done some of this stuff). In a nutshell, launching more satellites can be generally considered to increase risk of on-orbit collision and fragmentation, but quantifying it requires a lot of maths and physics. 3. Yes! There's is extensive and on-going research on this topic. Most people know the Kessler Syndrome [2], but honestly space debris research goes a lot further than that. This review by J.-C. Liou is a great starting point: https://commons.erau.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1233&context=stm https://commons.erau.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1233&co... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
mirashii 7y ago
1. Many of these satellites are cubesats. They hitch rides as secondary payloads on launches, and in batches. In Planet's case, they've launched many batches, some as large as 20-48 satellites. 2. Not really. Kessler syndrome is the general name for this phenomenon, but it's not a huge concern in LEO. In LEO, there is enough atmospheric drag to naturally deorbit spacecraft. For US based companies, regulations mandate that they have a deorbit plan within 25 years. For most cubesats, their orbits are low enough that they'll naturally deorbit within 5-7 years. 3. Most people generally think that any hazard in LEO will not be caused by launching more objects, but by having objects collide (or having some weaponry intentionally explode objects) causing debris that is spread more widely and too small to track. Currently JSpOC in the US tracks most objects the size of a baseball or larger in LEO and coordinates with various commercial and private entities to put into place plans for collision avoidance where possible.

dmix 7y ago

> Parts of the landmass can also be missing due to complete cloud cover that day. See the Amazon, Central Africa, or Northern Australia for example. Aka great places to start a terrorist or drug organization! The invasion of Iraq got delayed by a few days due to cloud coverage. It would definitely impede surveillance to have clouds often blocking satellites.

kartikkumar 7y ago
This is where SAR imagery comes into play [1]. There are a few SAR constellations online and being worked on that are shifting the discussion about what we can track [2][3]. [1] https://medium.com/from-the-macroscope/its-always-sunny-at-orbital-insight-our-work-with-sar-imagery-9907c850fe45 https://medium.com/from-the-macroscope/its-always-sunny-at-o... [2] https://www.iceye.com https://www.iceye.com [3] https://synspective.com https://synspective.com

tilolebo 7y ago

I worked for RapidEye during the launch in 2008. Exciting times! If I remember correctly, their planned lifetime for imaging was 7 years, so it's quite amazing that they're still active 11 years later.

Dansvidania 7y ago

this is incredibly cool. Thanks for sharing! The picture of Monte Fitz Roy is breath-taking. Is there any way to access more of the pictures?

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objectiveotter 7y ago
Check out: https://medium.com/planet-stories/earths-wonders-like-you-ve-never-seen-them-before-ac9e2f39aa56 https://medium.com/planet-stories/earths-wonders-like-you-ve...
- shpx 7y ago
  Mecca from space: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPgU5OYpwCs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPgU5OYpwCs

samstave 7y ago

test --- Why cant I comment on the other thread abt construction workers' suicides.. this is what I attempted to post: --- >Why do so many construction workers kill themselves? They got tired of building the future. --- On . serious note, construction is a thankless, shitty job. My dad was a general contractor, and he had an employee, who just had a baby... He took the baby to the neighbors house and asked them to "watch her for an hour" -- he then went back to his house and shot his wife, then killed himself. murder/suicide.... I think that baby was like 3-months old. --- Construction workers earn shit, are treated like shit and have REALLY physically demanding jobs. so their stress levels are HIGH. I think that the idea of Universal Basic Income shouls aplly TO ONLY CERTAIN INDUSTRIES. --- If you work in a certain field, which is a service field (basically) -- then yes you should get UBI - but if youre not contributing to society in any form - then no UBI for you. ______ I know its against ethos on HN to bitch about down-votes. BUT FUCK ANYONE WHO DOWNVOTED THIS COMMENT Construction is a thanklessm low-paying, high stress job and I shared an intimate story of a person I knew personally as an employee of my dad's construction company fucking killing his wife after having a baby... So FUCK you downvoters -- you fucking assholes that think that deep matters cant be discussed on HN. Check my account age... ive been around the block.

omeid2 7y ago

"This visualization doesn't work right on Firefox+Linux, sorry! You could try Chrome/Chromium instead." No Thanks.

winrid 7y ago
Chromium doesn't have all that tracking stuff right. What's wrong with it?
- TekMol 7y ago
  Not true. Chromium talks a lot to Googles servers. Additionally, "websites" that are made for chrome drive even more people into this monoculture which is bad for the web.
  - mda 7y ago
    What does it send? Any proof of shady behavior?
  - isostatic 7y ago
    Monoculture was bad when it was IE6, it's good when it's google. At least that's the SV Groupthink.
  - winrid 7y ago
    Did not know that.
- guardian5x 7y ago
  When Microsoft took the Chromium browser as a base for the new Edge version, they replaced over 50 Google services. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/8/18300772/microsoft-google-services-removed-changed-chromium-edge-browser https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/8/18300772/microsoft-google-...
  - mda 7y ago
    And they replace them with their stuff? You imply foul play but there is nothing in the list.

Dunedan 7y ago

"Omega tau" made a really nice podcast a while ago about how Planet Labs is approaching Earth observation. That podcast goes into the details how the company and the satellite constellation came to be and what novel approaches they're using. Definitely worth listening: http://omegataupodcast.net/204-earth-observation-at-planet-labs/ http://omegataupodcast.net/204-earth-observation-at-planet-l...

azernik 7y ago
This is fascinating - especially the talks about the advantages of using COTS electronics. Once upon a time, the latest and greatest in electronics was produced by military, scientific, and spaceflight applications, with commercial uses being spinoffs that were often up to a decade behind. Now the situation is reversed; consumer electronics are where the innovation is happening, and military/space systems are finding ways to repurpose that technology.
- kartikkumar 7y ago
  There's actually strong synergy. There's a lot of spin-in and spin-out going on between space and non-space sectors. COTS and general commodization of "discete units" (parts, subsystems, assemblies, etc.) is one of the biggest drivers for the commercialization of space. It's enabling people to move towards the use of advanced manufacturing techniques, cutting lead time and cost, and enabling batch production. We recently published an article on how manufacturing lines are changing in the space industry, inspired by best practices in mature commercial sectors like the auto industry: https://blog.satsearch.co/2019-08-08-demystifying-auto-industry-inspired-assembly-lines-in-the-space-industry.html https://blog.satsearch.co/2019-08-08-demystifying-auto-indus... We see a lot of this happening through our website: https://satsearch.co https://satsearch.co. We're effectively building a B2B marketplace because of this specific change in the way supply chains are being architected. Disclosure: I'm one of the co-founders at satsearch.
- branchan 7y ago
  I think this is only true for small LEO spacecrafts that are more or less 'disposable'. For higher cost GEO and interplanetary spacecraft, consumer electronics are not going to be hardened sufficiently and flight-proven to be used in those applications.

tunesmith 7y ago

I can't believe I've never wondered this before, but I wonder how possible it is to deliberately create a satellite-blocking cloud above one's own property. What height and size it would have to be, etc.

mbrumlow 7y ago
If you could track the satellite could you not shine a laser, or bright light (maybe a mirror reflecting the sun) directly at the camera to mess up the imaging while over your region?
- haditab 7y ago
  And if an aircraft flies over your property you could get charged with a federal offense (pointing a laser at an aircraft).
  - hanniabu 7y ago
    Ehhhh, the aircraft flew into the trajectory, are there no other comparable scenarios where there's an intersection that can happen accidentally?
    - tonyarkles 7y ago
      Basically, if you're planning on pointing a laser into the sky, you need at a minimum issue a NOTAM to inform aviators of the hazard. Things like outdoor concerts and some weather observation systems do this. But... Sending a laser into the sky and intersecting an aircraft that was operating per regulation? That's on the laser-er, and "creating a hazard to aviation" is not a charge that you'll be happy dealing with in many countries.
      - the_seraphim 7y ago
        sending a NOTAM isnt hard... you could put in a permenant notam. Also you wouldnt need a laser just a really bright searchlight

os7borne 7y ago

Stupid question: how do they measure speed of the satellite? I mean, on the website they've mentioned the speed of one of their satellite as ~7.6 kmps. Is that the actual speed of the satellite or it's a measure of how much land the the satellite covers per second?

TeMPOraL 7y ago
They can measure it by altitude. An orbiting object always has a defined velocity at any point of its orbit. For example, a circular orbit 500km above Earth's surface amounts to velocity of 7.61 km/s everywhere on it.
- os7borne 7y ago
  Makes sense. This is helpful. Thanks, TeMPOral!
mrtnmcc 7y ago
The orbital velocity and the ground track velocity only differ by about 6.6% for their 450km orbit, so it's not a big difference. But because they have a relatively circular orbit, you can use the formula sqrt(G*M/R) which gives 7.639km/sec -- so it looks like they are referring to true orbital velocity.
- os7borne 7y ago
  This is helpful, thanks!
loneranger_11x 7y ago
Not an expert. But there are a few ways to look at this. Bodies that are in stable orbit can have only a specific velocity which is a function of its distance from & mass of whatever it is orbiting. So orbiting satellite's speed can be inferred from its orbital height. There are ground based tracking stations that can technically measure the speed of any orbiting body. Also read somewhere that LEO satellites could use GPS receivers to get a fix on their position. measuring change in this position also gives velocity. There a bunch of limiting conditions around max-height and velocity for this to work though.

mkagenius 7y ago

Lot of blind spots (straight stips), are they covered in next satellite revolutions?

mkagenius 7y ago

Isn't this like rolling shutter ? But I don't see any stretching of the maps.

Rebelgecko 7y ago

Cool visualization. Would be neat if we could rotate the globe

NietTim 7y ago

Can we receive the signal from these satellites ourselves like we can with the NOAA satellites?

azernik 7y ago
Telemetry, probably; imagery, definitely not. (They sell this imagery, it's not public information like NOAA data.)
- ivanhoe 7y ago
  Do you mean that imagery can't be received for some technical reason (like being encrypted) or that it would be illegal to save it as it's copyrighted?
  - azernik 7y ago
    The former - encryption is cheap and lost revenue is expensive.
- patrickyeon 7y ago
  Telemetry and command and control signals are also encrypted.
NietTim 7y ago
Here's an article with much more technical talk then I could quickly find on Planet.com's website about one of their first flocks: https://directory.eoportal.org/web/eoportal/satellite-missions/f/flock-1 https://directory.eoportal.org/web/eoportal/satellite-missio... (only tonight have time to read it all)

yuuki1224 7y ago

that's great

dougmwne 7y ago

You can access their monthly imagery for free by creating an account at planet.com. I use it to track the progress of infrastructure and other land development projects near me. You can also create time lapse animations of a particular area, which is a super fun way to watch a road or a highway being built.

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bainsfather 7y ago
What is he resolution like? Is it as good as Google's aerial imagery that they show with their maps? (or Bing's)
- dougmwne 7y ago
  No way, not even close. At this point Google is doing overhead lidar flights to get incredibly details 3d maps. The Planet imagry is like going back several decades in satellite tech. But on the other hand, it's daily.
  - gjstein 7y ago
    Do you have a source for "overhead LIDAR flights"? I was under the impression that data was coming almost exclusively from their StreetView cars (with perhaps a few companies that provide helicopter-based data from time to time). True enough though that Google has a staggering amount of data about the earth.
    - dougmwne 7y ago
      My apologies. I remembered incorrectly. The aerial flights use computer vision to extract depth maps. While aerial LIDAR is used in GIS, I could not find LIDAR mentioned connected with Google's aerial imagery. https://blog.google/products/earth/google-earths-incredible-3d-imagery-explained/ https://blog.google/products/earth/google-earths-incredible-...

softwarelimits 7y ago

Absolutely great, I am sure we will need these kind of visualizations to survive. But the planet needs a JavaScript programming competition with the challenge of minimizing CPU load of such fantastic presentations. It would be so good to have one golden path to browser animations with the lowest energy consumption, one default framework that will be easy to use without deep knowledge of browser quirks and JavaScript optimization tricks. We are wasting too much time.

KuhlMensch 7y ago
Well, I would say, what we need and have is a rich ecosystem of JavaScript applications, which can and does guide both libraries and browser development. I'd say we need, the start-stop and often out-of-step (i.e. careful and experimental) shuffle toward standards. WebGL is just the latest waltz, but that visualisation is built on a bunch of foundational standards: TCP, HTTP, HTTPS, OpenGL, WebGL, etc etc The computers that got us to the moon where highly efficient integrated circuits. But (I presume) they can't get us to mars. Personally I'd advocate for messy, but rich platforms, which max out our CPUs in some applications; but give expression to the emergent desires of those who want to tinker. We don't have time to miss-out on potential wins by working with rigid systems.
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smartera 7y ago

Anyone familiar the pricing structure of Planet? I couldn't find that on their website.

groundlogic 7y ago
This paper contains some pricing from mid 2018 (including Planet/Dove): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326417596_Benchmark_of_Satellites_Image_Services_for_Precision_Agricultural_use https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326417596_Benchmark...

VoidWhisperer 7y ago

The visualization also does not show up with the 'Dark Reader' extension on, which is kind of odd.

chewbacha 7y ago

Welp, the final vestiges of privacy feel like they are being removed.

crazygringo 7y ago

Super cool! I wonder why both clouds and ocean show up as black instead of as actual white and blue imagery respectively. Are they saving money and bandwidth by not sending back "useless" imagery? Or something else?

slenk 7y ago
Pretty sure its black because they don't image them as its a waste of bandwidth
jofer 7y ago
Most cubesats have small solar panels and can't image all the time (i.e. they need to charge and then image). Mostly likely there no imaging at all over the oceans so the satellites can charge.
patrickyeon 7y ago
(I used to work at planet, this is my recollection of what was the case then) Usually, for ocean-sized bodies of water, we'd stop imaging entirely to reduce power load and align the solar panels with the sun. Effectively all of the ocean had nothing going on on the surface that we could image anyway. When Planet gets the imagery, they have a fairly good sense of where it is, but it is still processed to get it to align with ground truth, which is called rectification and relies on matching visible features to known ground features. If the entire image is clouds, this can't work and they don't publish the image because they can't say exactly where it is. Also, there's not really usable information in that imagery I guess.
- shpx 7y ago
  You could track container ships, in fact they're probably so easy to detect you could run a small computer vision model on the satellite and only transmit those photos. Obviously the most interesting container ships are the ones that you can see from space but don't show up on marine trackers. Although I don't know how you turn that information into money. Actually someone must already be doing this, Airbus sponsored a Kaggle competition for detecting ships in satellite imagery https://www.kaggle.com/c/airbus-ship-detection https://www.kaggle.com/c/airbus-ship-detection and maybe that's how they caught that Iranian oil tanker last month.

whatshisface 7y ago

For the people commenting on the Firefox+Linux issue: it doesn't work for me, and this is the error I get: >Refused to create native OpenGL context because of blacklist entry: FEATURE_FAILURE_OLD_NVIDIA So the real combination is Old NVIDIA drivers + Linux + Firefox. (Maybe not even Firefox, the issue might be inseparable from my old card. I'm not going to try it on Chromium.) The question is, why is my card blacklisted? I think it might be because of a security vulnerability that Chrome hasn't patched.

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arch-ninja 7y ago
Agreed, I have an intel embedded thingamabob and it works fine. I wonder if there's a software rendering option in FF that will make it work?
- ngngngng 7y ago
  Works for me as well, embedded graphics ubuntu and firefox

samirm 7y ago

I hope they start imaging at least parts of the ocean, like the great pacific garbage patch and other areas of particular interest for meteorologists and environmentalists.

rootusrootus 7y ago
I thought the garbage patch is not visible to the naked eye, mostly made up of microscopic particles, and especially not to a satellite with a 3m resolution?
- jayess 7y ago
  That's correct, it's something like four particles per cubic meter. > "fingernail-sized or smaller bits of plastic", often microscopic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch
- kleer001 7y ago
  I imagine it should still slightly alter the appearance of the water. Check out "Eulerian Video Magnification" for more.
  - schoen 7y ago
    That work is awesome, but don't they need changes over time in order to achieve the magnification? How would you get changes over time with the plastic pollution in order to view it this way?
    - kleer001 7y ago
      Use frames from the same area over a span of time.... What's confusing? There's a picture taken every day. If you're worried about the time span between the frames, I'm certain that shouldn't matter to the algorithm, it's just more noise and maybe the result takes longer to get..
branchan 7y ago

nico 7y ago

Really cool visualization! Talking about visualizing Earth. Does anyone know of alternative visualizations/projections of Earth (other than globes and maps)? For example, what would it look like if we could image Earth, entirely, from pole to pole, continuously, like a panoramic picture? (imagine the result as an impossibly wide picture that starts with one pole on the left and ends with the opposite pole on the right) Thank you.

gregsadetsky 7y ago
I don't think that this is exactly what you're asking for, but you can explore most "standard" projections below (definitely try out the first link described below): - Take a look at [0], click "Earth" in the lower left corner, then try other projections (they appear as the "A", "CE", "E", etc. list). Drag the map around to set the projection's "center". The real time projection calculations are pretty amazing..! - Go to [1] and toggle all of the categories ("Wall Maps", "Maps of Hemispheres", etc.) by clicking them. The maps are not dynamic / cannot be dragged around (like [0]), but this is a more complete reference list (similar to Wikipedia's list of map projections [2]). The rest of the site is also absolutely incredible (I recommend taking ~1 hour to go through the whole list of projects one by one). [0] https://earth.nullschool.net/ https://earth.nullschool.net/ [1] http://www.radicalcartography.net/index.html?projectionref http://www.radicalcartography.net/index.html?projectionref [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_map_projections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_map_projections

anotheryou 7y ago

Really cool tech! I wanted to apply for a job there, but in the end didn't because of their undisclosed military clients.

f137 7y ago

I do not see daily updates on planet.com, at least for the free trial account I just created, and for my location (Eastern Europe). For example, there is a damb nearby which was completed a few months ago, but is shown half-built in their map.