Last fall, Planet completed Mission 1: imaging the Earth’s entire landmass every single day. It was a landmark achievement and a first in the history of humanity. But the big question on everyone’s minds since has been, Now what? We’ve kept intentionally quiet over the past few months, but today, we’re ready to announce the next phase of Planet: Mission 2: Megasats.

• Single capture of the entire solar system
• So much data, you’ll drown in it
• Machine learning insights delivered straight from the Oort cloud
• Decades-long build cycles
• Space junk with its own gravitational field

What does this mean for the solar system? A radically new dataset that can be fed into machine learning algorithms for insights on:

• Monitoring frontier moon bases
• Space weather forecasting
• Precision terraforming
• Asteroid commodities trading

The project is in collaboration with SpaceX — whose newly announced ‘BFR’ launcher is ideally suited to these mega satellites. With a throw mass of 200 tonnes to orbit, it can just about launch 1 megasatellite. "Apart from going to Mars, there’s few use cases for such a large rocket, but we found one," said Will Marshall, CEO and co-founder of Planet.