Planet Signs Multi-Million Dollar Agreement with NASA

Founded by three former NASA scientists, Planet is delighted to announce we’ve signed a multi-million dollar agreement with the space agency to provide earth observation data for the identification and tracking of the Essential Climate Variables.

Through this agreement, NASA will provide Planet data to more than 35 NASA ongoing research projects in order to evaluate how Planet’s commercial dataset can augment NASA’s own Earth science data, including the MODIS, GEDI and ICESat-2 missions, among others.

NASA has broad interests in land use and land cover change, forest and ocean science, and polar and cryosphere applications, and Planet’s daily global data feed and 10-year imagery archive is uniquely suited to support their mission to monitor and study global change in real-time. All three of Planet’s datasets – Dove, RapidEye and SkySat imagery – will contribute to NASA’s activities.

NASA researchers will build upon early results generated from Planet’s Education and Research Program, which sponsors limited access to students and faculty of universities worldwide and has generated scores of studies exploring scientific applications of Planet data to the whole Earth system.

“We’re psyched to be working with Planet,” said Senior Scientist Compton Tucker of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. “The thought of daily global visible-near infrared satellite data at 3-4 meter spatial resolution is a game changer for Earth Science.”

“Getting our data into the hands of renowned climate scientists to help measure essential climate variables furthers our mission of providing timely, global imagery and analytics to empower informed, deliberate, and meaningful stewardship of our planet,” said Robbie Schingler, Planet’s co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer.

Planet is committed to scaling applications that provide the greatest benefit to the largest amount of people, and we are confident the applications devised by NASA will be commensurate with Planet’s founding intent: to use space to help life on Earth.