Pelican-2 & 36 SuperDoves Arrived in Vandenberg, California For Launch
Pelican-2 photographed ahead of departure at Planet Labs manufacturing lab in San Francisco, California
Planet Labs PBC (NYSE:PL), a leading provider of daily Earth data and insights, today announced that its latest high-resolution satellite Pelican-2 and 36 SuperDoves have arrived at Vandenberg Space Force Base on December 9, in preparation for liftoff in early 2025 on board the Transporter-12 Rideshare mission with SpaceX. Pelican-2 joins Pelican-1 (a smallsat platform tech demonstration launched last year) as part of Planet’s next-generation, high-resolution fleet, to support and expand its existing SkySat capabilities.
This Pelican satellite is designed to provide up to 40 cm class resolution imagery across 6 multispectral bands optimized for cross-sensor analysis. Additionally, Planet has collaborated with NVIDIA to equip Pelican-2 with the NVIDIA Jetson platform for edge AI and robotics to power on-orbit computing—with the aim of vastly reducing the time between data capture and its availability for customers. Pelican-2 is designed to rapidly convert precise spatial data into near-real-time insights by utilizing AI-powered solutions for use cases including object detection, vegetation and crop type classification, and disaster response.
“It’s exciting to see Pelican 2 on its way to launch. With NVIDIA’s latest GPU onboard, we plan to combine cutting-edge AI with sat-to-sat comms – aiming to speed customer delivery time from hours to minutes. This is critical for applications from security to disaster response where minutes can make the difference,” said Will Marshall, Co-Founder and CEO of Planet. “We’re proud of our key partnerships with NVIDIA and NASA that have helped enable these advanced technologies onboard and have imbued Pelican-2 with this state-of-the-art capability.”
Pelican-2 is also equipped with C-band and Ka-band radios, designed to conduct Planet’s first on-orbit tests of satellite-to-satellite communications links, building on the ground demonstrations of technology completed last year as part of Planet’s work for the NASA Communications Services Project (NASA CSP). Planet is subcontracted to both SES Space & Defense and Telesat Government Solutions for the NASA CSP program, one of Planet’s many public-private partnerships that are critical in furthering the Earth Observation industry’s growth and adoption across a wide range of industries and applications.
In addition to complementing Planet’s existing SkySat capabilities, the new Pelican fleet represents a new milestone as the company continues to pioneer agile aerospace. Planet’s proprietary, leading smallsat platform powers the largest fleet of EO satellites, now with three different constellations of satellites to supply three distinct but complementary datasets to its customers. The 36 SuperDove satellites—PlanetScope Flock 4G—will join Pelican-2 on the launch in order to replenish Planet’s on-orbit medium resolution fleet. Today, Planet’s SuperDoves capture daily, 8-band data of Earth’s changing systems, allowing commercial users, researchers, and governments to gain unparalleled insight at regional and global scales.