Planet Labs PBC, one of the leading providers of daily data and insights about Earth, today announced it is collaborating with NVIDIA on its onboard processing capabilities for its high-resolution Pelican-2 satellite. Through this collaboration, Planet will leverage the NVIDIA Jetson edge AI platform for its next-generation high-resolution mission and fly the technology on its Pelican-2 satellite set to launch later this year.
NVIDIA GPU accelerated computing will power intelligent imaging and faster insights for customers. Leveraging recent advances in artificial intelligence, Planet expects this collaboration to support shorter time to value for customers across government and commercial markets.
“Robust datasets are what power AI, and Planet is fully embracing the latest advancements happening in this AI revolution, from enhancing our satellite technology to pulling insights from our imagery data at rapid speeds,” said Kiruthika Devaraj, VP of Avionics and Spacecraft at Planet. “This collaboration is about getting answers from orbit to our customers in near real-time. The suite of solutions that Planet can generate for our customers with our high-resolution optical sensor on Pelican is enhanced by NVIDIA Jetson and real-time connectivity. With the latest technology demonstrations launching on Pelican-2, our customers and partners will be able to access, process, and download imagery as well as real-time insights at a rapid pace and on low- and high-bandwidth connectivity based on their unique constraints.”
“Running compute on-orbit allows us to design new pipelines that can understand the data as it is being collected, without waiting for data download and delivery. Such on-orbit compute will enable many new (and important) capabilities, such as real-time tracking of events like forest fires, disasters, and other events of interest,” said Deepak Vasisht, Assistant Professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Planet will be one of the first to space-qualify and fly NVIDIA Jetson on an Earth observation satellite.
Click here to learn about Planet's Pelican satellite constellation.
