The world’s ports have tons of stories to tell.
They’re essential to healthy economies, facilitating the flow of goods, resources, and people around the globe. Whether used for trade or defense, we can learn a lot about industries and nation states by observing regular port activity over time. When sanctions are imposed, or shortages reported, we usually can see it first by looking at a port. From a defense standpoint, naval powers choose strategically located ports to build and deploy effective navies.
In monitoring the world’s ports every day, we’d have a daily pulse of world affairs. With a large, steady stream of data, analysts can observe ports day-to-day, establish baselines of activity, and perhaps make data-based predictions about what’s to come. However, there are very few perches from which even the most savvy analysts can monitor all of the world’s ports simultaneously. For this, we need satellites.
The Tech
Planet’s constellation of small satellites soon will image the entire Earth’s landmass daily. With each new flock of satellites we’ve launched, we’ve broadened our imaging capacity in square kilometers, and reduced the amount of time between “revisits” at any given place on the globe.
Take a look at how our data volumes have changed over time:
