Planet Labs wants to analyze and index its 1.4 million daily photos to enable researchers to track Earth’s physical changes over time.
Six years ago, a group of scientists and engineers, among them three former NASA employees, gathered in a garage in Cupertino, California, with a goal: to found a company whose mission was to capture an image of Earth’s entire landmass every day. To do so, Planet Labs, as they called themselves, had to use satellites small enough and cost-effective enough to launch en masse in a “fleet” that could traverse Earth, snapping images and collecting data.