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IPFS News Link • Surveillance

Monitoring the world with microsatellites and open source data

• https://www.nextbigfuture.com

Planet Labs uses 149 microsatellites to monitor the pulse of our planet with daily news and imagery, stories, and tech updates.

Current satellite imaging only allows us to look at various disconnected locations. Planet's always-on, daily imagery provides a global monitoring capability never before possible. Frequent satellite imagery is often a critical component to understanding our increasingly complex, interconnected world. Use Planet's timely imagery to monitor and understand global activity and patterns of life.

They already have on average over 150 images for each location on the Earth's land surface. This can be accessed with there Planet Explorer.

Defense One described how they detected an unplanned military exercise.

They get new imagery coming in every day, you can automate a search for changes at various locations. That means you can detect when a military begins to operate in a given area, and perhaps even deduce what kind of equipment they're using — all at exponentially less cost than it would take to run the same operation a decade ago.

In 3Gimbals' case, analysts trained an algorithm to track changes in the quantity and position of white and blue pixels in a given area. That might not sound particularly revolutionary, but it enabled them to verify that the number of military vessels was unusually low during a window of time in March 2016. This meant vessels were missing from a strategically important port. Scouring for additional open-source clues, 3Gimbals verified that Venezuela was running an unscheduled and unplanned military exercise.


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