Planet just upgraded their satellite imagery offering that Swift Geospatial will be testing…stay tuned…here’s what you need to know.

Dear Planet User,

You may have heard rumblings…but now it’s official! We’re starting to release the next generation of our high-frequency, global PlanetScope monitoring imagery starting on Tuesday, August 6th.

What’s improving?

In keeping with Planet’s agile approach, we’ve made significant investments in our flagship PlanetScope imagery over the past year. That means a few things for you:

  • Richer, more vibrant color due to improved sensors
  • More consistent surface reflectance values
  • Spectral band alignment with public missions, like Sentinel-2
  • Continued high-frequency coverage

How does this impacts you?

This imagery will be available to you in Planet’s platform in the same way as all of our PlanetScope Imagery, and you’ll be able to specifically search for this next generation data using the metadata:

  • On Tuesday August 6th, this new imagery will start to be released with the label test under the quality_category field. From Tuesday August 13th on, imagery will be published as normal under standardand test in the quality_category field
  • In the Data API: Search under instrument for PS2.SD 

We’ve done a lot of work internally to make sure transitioning to this new data is as seamless as possible for you, but we strongly encourage you to explore the imagery, perform some basic validation and browse through the documentation to better understand this new data and ensure any unique use cases you have continue to function as expected.

Check out the Product Spec, instrument Overview, and the FAQs on the Developer Center, and please reach out if you have any questions in the meantime.

Cheers,
Planet