PlanetScope2 Imagery Available in the Planet Platform

PlanetScope2 imagery comes from Planet’s new telescope, offering a much wider field of view and crisper images. The new telescope will be included in all of our future Dove satellites. Through the Planet Platform, you can now access PlanetScope2 imagery through the API and Web Applications, available in visual and analytic products.

The picture below compares PlanetScope1 data collected on September 5, 2015 (center) with PlanetScope2 data from October 30th. Both Doves were at a similar altitude.

Compared to PlanetScope1, Planetscope2 provides a wider swath, better signal to noise across the entire image, and JPEG2000 wavelet compression. Each PlanetScope1 image covers about 12 by 8 kilometers, while PlanetScope2 covers 20 by 13 kilometers.

Signal to noise at the edges of PlanetScope2 is better than that in the center of a PlanetScope1 image, resulting in better contrast and about 7 times more usable pixels than the older optics.

The on-board FPGA paired with PlanetScope2’s camera not only allows the high data rates needed to capture more than one frame per second, but enables wavelet compression via JPEG2000. Wavelet compression yields scientific-quality data at higher compression ratios than conventional JPEG’s discrete cosine transform compression, and maintains a 12-bit-per-pixel sample size from camera to ground.