Planet: Imaging the entire Earth every day

https://nbremer.github.io/planet-globe/

by NaOH • 7 years ago

464 133 7 years ago

nbremer.github.io

safwan• 7 years ago

Are we moving to the Chrome only world?

mikaelsouza• 7 years ago

Do you mind to share which browser you're using? It's working fine for me on Firefox.

the_pwner224• 7 years ago

When I load it, the website states that the simulation does not work on Firefox + Linux. Works fine for me when I re-opened it in Falkon (WebKit-based).

Edit: another responder to the parent comment said it works for them on Firefox dev edition on Arch Linux. I'm using Nightly on Arch and it gives the message stated above. With a UA switcher set to Chrome Windows, it loads but renders the image strips on the map as black stripes instead of 'textured' ones. Interesting...

mikedilger• 7 years ago

Works for me on firefox-developer-edition. Does not work on vanilla chromium. ArchLinux.

testrun• 7 years ago

Working fine for me, Firefox 68.0.1 and Ubuntu 19.04

_navaneethan• 7 years ago

Works for me as well. I love firefox!

intc• 7 years ago

Works fine on UXP (git commit 5a957202b70a0b11078b0cffa8967b63baff5661) / Gentoo Linux.

snek• 7 years ago

Using a UA switcher and FF, I can't seem to find anything broken. I think the author of this page is just a bit zealous for chrome.

It also seems to work without UA switcher, but still states it won't work. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

cgriswald• 7 years ago

Perhaps the modern equivalent of “best viewed in Netscape”?

SenHeng• 7 years ago

Works in Safari.

undefinedFoo• 7 years ago

Works for me in Firefox 68.0.1 in Win10, kinda slow tho but it might be because of my hardware setup.

meigwilym• 7 years ago

Doesn't work for me either. Ubuntu 18.04.3 and Firefox 68.0.1.

The console gives this error: "TypeError: m is null".

garmaine• 7 years ago

Can’t see anything on the globe, just a circle.

parsimo2010• 7 years ago

Portions of the Earth appear as white dots orbit and the Earth rotates underneath. It works in Chrome but not Firefox for me. It's worth spending 10 seconds looking at, but I feel like I wasted some time opening up two browsers to check compatibility.

dmix2• 7 years ago

On mobile it says to use desktop to see all the of the pictures which I can confirm there's way more.

Edit: checking the source code it only shows "20% of the photos" on mobile

    The visual below shows the locations <span class="small-data-note">of 20%</span> of the photos

mnw21cam• 7 years ago

Can't even see a circle.

mrhappyunhappy• 7 years ago

So many questions:

1. How did they get 150 satellites into low orbit?

2. Is it becoming a hazard to have all the satellites and space junk possibly making it difficult to launch anything down the road?

3. Aside from tracking the objects, has anyone made any calculations as to when these things will become a hazard?

roywiggins• 7 years ago

They are launched in groups. Lots of them are really small.

https://nbremer.github.io/planet-constellations/

kartikkumar3• 7 years ago

1. They launched by piggybacking on rockets that were launching larger satellites. For instance, they launched 88 on this record-setting PSLV launch: https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2017/02/indias-pslv-record-1...

2. People generally have a poor understanding of how vast space is. Congestion in specific low-Earth orbits is definitely a concern, but the devil is in the details. For instance, launching to Sun-Synchronous orbit (SSO) [1] above ~600 km is considered to pose significant risk to on-orbit assets, because of how many satellites are in SSO and the kinetic energy their carry, however to really assess the risk, you need to do a lot of detailed population studies (I've done some of this stuff). In a nutshell, launching more satellites can be generally considered to increase risk of on-orbit collision and fragmentation, but quantifying it requires a lot of maths and physics.

3. Yes! There's is extensive and on-going research on this topic. Most people know the Kessler Syndrome [2], but honestly space debris research goes a lot further than that. This review by J.-C. Liou is a great starting point: https://commons.erau.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1233&co...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

mirashii• 7 years ago

1. Many of these satellites are cubesats. They hitch rides as secondary payloads on launches, and in batches. In Planet's case, they've launched many batches, some as large as 20-48 satellites.

2. Not really. Kessler syndrome is the general name for this phenomenon, but it's not a huge concern in LEO. In LEO, there is enough atmospheric drag to naturally deorbit spacecraft. For US based companies, regulations mandate that they have a deorbit plan within 25 years. For most cubesats, their orbits are low enough that they'll naturally deorbit within 5-7 years.

3. Most people generally think that any hazard in LEO will not be caused by launching more objects, but by having objects collide (or having some weaponry intentionally explode objects) causing debris that is spread more widely and too small to track. Currently JSpOC in the US tracks most objects the size of a baseball or larger in LEO and coordinates with various commercial and private entities to put into place plans for collision avoidance where possible.

rzimmerman• 7 years ago

Thanks for this really concise answer. Here's a paper we did a while back that lists the launch history and some of the different orbit types of the Dove satellites: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3...

dmix2• 7 years ago

Parts of the landmass can also be missing due to complete cloud cover that day. See the Amazon, Central Africa, or Northern Australia for example.

Aka great places to start a terrorist or drug organization!

The invasion of Iraq got delayed by a few days due to cloud coverage. It would definitely impede surveillance to have clouds often blocking satellites.

kartikkumar3• 7 years ago

This is where SAR imagery comes into play [1]. There are a few SAR constellations online and being worked on that are shifting the discussion about what we can track [2][3].

[1] https://medium.com/from-the-macroscope/its-always-sunny-at-o...

[2] https://www.iceye.com

[3] https://synspective.com

tilolebo• 7 years ago

I worked for RapidEye during the launch in 2008. Exciting times!

If I remember correctly, their planned lifetime for imaging was 7 years, so it's quite amazing that they're still active 11 years later.

Dansvidania• 7 years ago

this is incredibly cool. Thanks for sharing!

The picture of Monte Fitz Roy is breath-taking. Is there any way to access more of the pictures?

objectiveotter• 7 years ago

Check out: https://medium.com/planet-stories/earths-wonders-like-you-ve...

shpx3• 7 years ago

Mecca from space: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPgU5OYpwCs

omeid2• 7 years ago

"This visualization doesn't work right on Firefox+Linux, sorry! You could try Chrome/Chromium instead."

No Thanks.

winrid2• 7 years ago

Chromium doesn't have all that tracking stuff right. What's wrong with it?

TekMol• 7 years ago

Not true. Chromium talks a lot to Googles servers.

Additionally, "websites" that are made for chrome drive even more people into this monoculture which is bad for the web.

guardian5x• 7 years ago

When Microsoft took the Chromium browser as a base for the new Edge version, they replaced over 50 Google services.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/8/18300772/microsoft-google-...

erklik• 7 years ago

It drives the people towards having one browser controlled by a mega corporation. We, at the very least, as developers need to support multiple browsers to prevent the monopolization that could one-day threaten the current style and freedom of the internet that we admire and like (generally).

gattr• 7 years ago

Seems to work fine here (Firefox 68.0, Radeon R370, Fedora 5.2.7-100.fc29.x86_64, KDE/X-Window). That is, I can see the satellites and the rotating globe with strips of land gradually revealed.

unhammer• 7 years ago

The visualisation works fine in newest Firefox on Linux, though only in Chromium do I get the sound effects (like a high pitched fan noise)

mikekchar2• 7 years ago

Just so that it's clear to other people: The message is in the text of the page, but it does seem to work on a recent version of Firefox.

alexghr• 7 years ago

Works fine for me in Firefox 69 (beta)

dotancohen• 7 years ago

No Thanks.

Right you are.

Do note that it works fine on my Ubuntu 18.04 machine with Intel graphics on the motherboard, in Firefox 68.

lukaszkups• 7 years ago

I'm on Ubuntu, Firefox and it's working flawlessly

Dunedan• 7 years ago

"Omega tau" made a really nice podcast a while ago about how Planet Labs is approaching Earth observation. That podcast goes into the details how the company and the satellite constellation came to be and what novel approaches they're using. Definitely worth listening: http://omegataupodcast.net/204-earth-observation-at-planet-l...

azernik6• 7 years ago

This is fascinating - especially the talks about the advantages of using COTS electronics.

Once upon a time, the latest and greatest in electronics was produced by military, scientific, and spaceflight applications, with commercial uses being spinoffs that were often up to a decade behind. Now the situation is reversed; consumer electronics are where the innovation is happening, and military/space systems are finding ways to repurpose that technology.

kartikkumar3• 7 years ago

There's actually strong synergy. There's a lot of spin-in and spin-out going on between space and non-space sectors.

COTS and general commodization of "discete units" (parts, subsystems, assemblies, etc.) is one of the biggest drivers for the commercialization of space. It's enabling people to move towards the use of advanced manufacturing techniques, cutting lead time and cost, and enabling batch production.

We recently published an article on how manufacturing lines are changing in the space industry, inspired by best practices in mature commercial sectors like the auto industry: https://blog.satsearch.co/2019-08-08-demystifying-auto-indus...

We see a lot of this happening through our website: https://satsearch.co. We're effectively building a B2B marketplace because of this specific change in the way supply chains are being architected.

Disclosure: I'm one of the co-founders at satsearch.

branchan5• 7 years ago

I think this is only true for small LEO spacecrafts that are more or less 'disposable'. For higher cost GEO and interplanetary spacecraft, consumer electronics are not going to be hardened sufficiently and flight-proven to be used in those applications.

tunesmith• 7 years ago

I can't believe I've never wondered this before, but I wonder how possible it is to deliberately create a satellite-blocking cloud above one's own property. What height and size it would have to be, etc.

mbrumlow• 7 years ago

If you could track the satellite could you not shine a laser, or bright light (maybe a mirror reflecting the sun) directly at the camera to mess up the imaging while over your region?

haditab• 7 years ago

And if an aircraft flies over your property you could get charged with a federal offense (pointing a laser at an aircraft).

XorNot• 7 years ago

This would simply make it very obvious that you are investing substantial resources trying to obscure a location.

azernik6• 7 years ago

Just make a big warehouse, or put your activities underground. That's what militaries do (also covered drydocks and berthing slots).

sroussey• 7 years ago

Just move to San Francisco. ;)

ivanhoe2• 7 years ago

It's called anthropogenic clouds, and it's possible but requires certain weather conditions to work: you need a source of water vapor that can saturate the air, and a stream of cold air to condensate that vapor. Then it's possible to launch particles into the air that would act as cloud condensation nucleus, and in theory it should start the cloud formation. Anyway, to hide a small area much easier solution would be to have a lot of smoke, or to artificially generate fog which is much easier to do than clouds...

SiempreViernes• 7 years ago

The more common approach is using a large roof, and after that to build where it is usually cloudy.

carapace• 7 years ago

Geodesic dome, cheaper and more durable. As added bonus it protects you from the heat.

One day we will likely dome cities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man_River%27s_City_project

schoen2• 7 years ago

One of the uses of a radome (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radome) is to conceal the appearance of the antenna inside, so that people photographing it can't learn what frequency and direction it targets. That includes by satellite photography.

I don't think it would be very pleasant to have a radome over your house or yard, though, since you usually want sunlight to come in!

os7borne4• 7 years ago

Stupid question: how do they measure speed of the satellite? I mean, on the website they've mentioned the speed of one of their satellite as ~7.6 kmps. Is that the actual speed of the satellite or it's a measure of how much land the the satellite covers per second?

TeMPOraL• 7 years ago

They can measure it by altitude. An orbiting object always has a defined velocity at any point of its orbit. For example, a circular orbit 500km above Earth's surface amounts to velocity of 7.61 km/s everywhere on it.

os7borne4• 7 years ago

Makes sense. This is helpful. Thanks, TeMPOral!

mrtnmcc• 7 years ago

The orbital velocity and the ground track velocity only differ by about 6.6% for their 450km orbit, so it's not a big difference. But because they have a relatively circular orbit, you can use the formula sqrt(G*M/R) which gives 7.639km/sec -- so it looks like they are referring to true orbital velocity.

os7borne4• 7 years ago

This is helpful, thanks!

loneranger_11x• 7 years ago

Not an expert. But there are a few ways to look at this.

Bodies that are in stable orbit can have only a specific velocity which is a function of its distance from & mass of whatever it is orbiting. So orbiting satellite's speed can be inferred from its orbital height.

There are ground based tracking stations that can technically measure the speed of any orbiting body.

Also read somewhere that LEO satellites could use GPS receivers to get a fix on their position. measuring change in this position also gives velocity. There a bunch of limiting conditions around max-height and velocity for this to work though.

os7borne4• 7 years ago

Ah! Got it. Thanks!

mkagenius2• 7 years ago

Lot of blind spots (straight stips), are they covered in next satellite revolutions?

mkagenius2• 7 years ago

Isn't this like rolling shutter ? But I don't see any stretching of the maps.

Rebelgecko3• 7 years ago

Cool visualization. Would be neat if we could rotate the globe

NietTim2• 7 years ago

Can we receive the signal from these satellites ourselves like we can with the NOAA satellites?

azernik6• 7 years ago

Telemetry, probably; imagery, definitely not. (They sell this imagery, it's not public information like NOAA data.)

ivanhoe2• 7 years ago

Do you mean that imagery can't be received for some technical reason (like being encrypted) or that it would be illegal to save it as it's copyrighted?

patrickyeon3• 7 years ago

Telemetry and command and control signals are also encrypted.

NietTim2• 7 years ago

Here's an article with much more technical talk then I could quickly find on Planet.com's website about one of their first flocks: https://directory.eoportal.org/web/eoportal/satellite-missio... (only tonight have time to read it all)

yuuki1224• 7 years ago

that's great

dougmwne3• 7 years ago

You can access their monthly imagery for free by creating an account at planet.com. I use it to track the progress of infrastructure and other land development projects near me. You can also create time lapse animations of a particular area, which is a super fun way to watch a road or a highway being built.

bainsfather• 7 years ago

What is he resolution like? Is it as good as Google's aerial imagery that they show with their maps? (or Bing's)

dougmwne3• 7 years ago

No way, not even close. At this point Google is doing overhead lidar flights to get incredibly details 3d maps. The Planet imagry is like going back several decades in satellite tech. But on the other hand, it's daily.

joshvm• 7 years ago

Both Bing and Google use aerial imagery with centimetre-scale resolution (certainly 25cm). PlanetScope is 3m I think, the totally free stuff like Sentinel 2 is 10m (5 day revisit). The best commercial imaging satellites are <0.5m. Below that it's simpler to use aircraft.

shpx3• 7 years ago

When I signed up last year I also got a free two week trial period where I could see the daily data. Looks like these days they even let you see what coverage they have of the daily data with a free account, but at very low resolution.

You highlight a region of the planet and they find you all the past imagery of that region. Though most of the daily results are a few strips that pass through the region, with some (or most) of the region missing. They haven't accomplished their ideal of "a picture of the entire earth once a day" but still one of the coolest companies out there.

https://www.planet.com/explorer

Rebelgecko3• 7 years ago

I thought they EOL'd the free offering?

joushx• 7 years ago

They looked me up on LinkedIn using my email address and called by boss to ask me about the service.

softwarelimits• 7 years ago

Absolutely great, I am sure we will need these kind of visualizations to survive.

But the planet needs a JavaScript programming competition with the challenge of minimizing CPU load of such fantastic presentations.

It would be so good to have one golden path to browser animations with the lowest energy consumption, one default framework that will be easy to use without deep knowledge of browser quirks and JavaScript optimization tricks.

We are wasting too much time.

KuhlMensch• 7 years ago

Well, I would say, what we need and have is a rich ecosystem of JavaScript applications, which can and does guide both libraries and browser development. I'd say we need, the start-stop and often out-of-step (i.e. careful and experimental) shuffle toward standards. WebGL is just the latest waltz, but that visualisation is built on a bunch of foundational standards: TCP, HTTP, HTTPS, OpenGL, WebGL, etc etc

The computers that got us to the moon where highly efficient integrated circuits. But (I presume) they can't get us to mars.

Personally I'd advocate for messy, but rich platforms, which max out our CPUs in some applications; but give expression to the emergent desires of those who want to tinker.

We don't have time to miss-out on potential wins by working with rigid systems.

smartera• 7 years ago

Anyone familiar the pricing structure of Planet? I couldn't find that on their website.

groundlogic• 7 years ago

This paper contains some pricing from mid 2018 (including Planet/Dove):

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326417596_Benchmark...

VoidWhisperer• 7 years ago

The visualization also does not show up with the 'Dark Reader' extension on, which is kind of odd.

chewbacha• 7 years ago

Welp, the final vestiges of privacy feel like they are being removed.

crazygringo• 7 years ago

Super cool!

I wonder why both clouds and ocean show up as black instead of as actual white and blue imagery respectively.

Are they saving money and bandwidth by not sending back "useless" imagery? Or something else?

slenk• 7 years ago

Pretty sure its black because they don't image them as its a waste of bandwidth

jofer3• 7 years ago

Most cubesats have small solar panels and can't image all the time (i.e. they need to charge and then image). Mostly likely there no imaging at all over the oceans so the satellites can charge.

patrickyeon3• 7 years ago

(I used to work at planet, this is my recollection of what was the case then)

Usually, for ocean-sized bodies of water, we'd stop imaging entirely to reduce power load and align the solar panels with the sun. Effectively all of the ocean had nothing going on on the surface that we could image anyway.

When Planet gets the imagery, they have a fairly good sense of where it is, but it is still processed to get it to align with ground truth, which is called rectification and relies on matching visible features to known ground features. If the entire image is clouds, this can't work and they don't publish the image because they can't say exactly where it is. Also, there's not really usable information in that imagery I guess.

shpx3• 7 years ago

You could track container ships, in fact they're probably so easy to detect you could run a small computer vision model on the satellite and only transmit those photos.

Obviously the most interesting container ships are the ones that you can see from space but don't show up on marine trackers. Although I don't know how you turn that information into money.

Actually someone must already be doing this, Airbus sponsored a Kaggle competition for detecting ships in satellite imagery https://www.kaggle.com/c/airbus-ship-detection and maybe that's how they caught that Iranian oil tanker last month.

whatshisface• 7 years ago

For the people commenting on the Firefox+Linux issue: it doesn't work for me, and this is the error I get:

Refused to create native OpenGL context because of blacklist entry: FEATURE_FAILURE_OLD_NVIDIA

So the real combination is Old NVIDIA drivers + Linux + Firefox. (Maybe not even Firefox, the issue might be inseparable from my old card. I'm not going to try it on Chromium.) The question is, why is my card blacklisted? I think it might be because of a security vulnerability that Chrome hasn't patched.

arch-ninja• 7 years ago

Agreed, I have an intel embedded thingamabob and it works fine. I wonder if there's a software rendering option in FF that will make it work?

ngngngng• 7 years ago

Works for me as well, embedded graphics ubuntu and firefox

samirm2• 7 years ago

I hope they start imaging at least parts of the ocean, like the great pacific garbage patch and other areas of particular interest for meteorologists and environmentalists.

rootusrootus• 7 years ago

I thought the garbage patch is not visible to the naked eye, mostly made up of microscopic particles, and especially not to a satellite with a 3m resolution?

jayess• 7 years ago

That's correct, it's something like four particles per cubic meter.

"fingernail-sized or smaller bits of plastic", often microscopic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch

kleer0012• 7 years ago

I imagine it should still slightly alter the appearance of the water. Check out "Eulerian Video Magnification" for more.

branchan5• 7 years ago

You can't see the garbage patch from space.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2018/03/great-pacifi...

nico• 7 years ago

Really cool visualization!

Talking about visualizing Earth. Does anyone know of alternative visualizations/projections of Earth (other than globes and maps)?

For example, what would it look like if we could image Earth, entirely, from pole to pole, continuously, like a panoramic picture? (imagine the result as an impossibly wide picture that starts with one pole on the left and ends with the opposite pole on the right)

Thank you.

gregsadetsky• 7 years ago

I don't think that this is exactly what you're asking for, but you can explore most "standard" projections below (definitely try out the first link described below):

- Take a look at [0], click "Earth" in the lower left corner, then try other projections (they appear as the "A", "CE", "E", etc. list). Drag the map around to set the projection's "center". The real time projection calculations are pretty amazing..!

- Go to [1] and toggle all of the categories ("Wall Maps", "Maps of Hemispheres", etc.) by clicking them. The maps are not dynamic / cannot be dragged around (like [0]), but this is a more complete reference list (similar to Wikipedia's list of map projections [2]). The rest of the site is also absolutely incredible (I recommend taking ~1 hour to go through the whole list of projects one by one).

[0] https://earth.nullschool.net/

[1] http://www.radicalcartography.net/index.html?projectionref

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_map_projections

anotheryou• 7 years ago

Really cool tech! I wanted to apply for a job there, but in the end didn't because of their undisclosed military clients.

f137• 7 years ago

I do not see daily updates on planet.com, at least for the free trial account I just created, and for my location (Eastern Europe).

For example, there is a damb nearby which was completed a few months ago, but is shown half-built in their map.

Planet: Imaging the entire Earth every day

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