Planet has announced a new line of imaging satellites, known as "Owl", designed to replace their existing SuperDove fleet, which has been a cornerstone of the company's operations. Will Marshall, co-founder and chief executive of Planet, shared details in an Oct. 7 blog post, stating that the first Owl satellite is slated for launch late next year. This marks a significant step forward in their Earth observation capabilities.
"Owl will be designed to deliver frequent, best-in-class imagery faster, enabling customers to receive imagery-enabled insights within as little as one hour of capture," he said. This promises quicker access to crucial data for various applications.
The Owl satellites will offer a significant upgrade in resolution compared to the SuperDoves. While SuperDoves provide imagery at a resolution of three to four meters, the new Owl spacecraft will capture data at a one-meter resolution. Furthermore, these satellites will feature Nvidia processors, enabling “AI at the edge” onboard processing for tasks such as object identification and activity detection.
According to Marshall, the Owl satellites will maintain "seamless continuity" with the SuperDoves, utilizing the same core spectral bands. This ensures that customers can continue using their existing workflows for analyzing the imagery without major disruptions.
Planet has cultivated a comprehensive daily record of Earth's surface through the Dove and SuperDove satellites. Robbie Schingler, co-founder and chief strategy officer of Planet, emphasized the significance of this data archive in an Oct. 8 speech at the New Zealand Aerospace Summit: “We have an eight-year daily history of change on the planet everywhere. It has become a foundational data layer.”
Illustrations released by Planet indicate that the Owl satellites will be physically larger than the 3U cubesat form factor used by SuperDoves. A company spokesperson confirmed this, adding that the Owl satellites are indeed larger but declined to disclose their specific mass or dimensions.
"Looking ahead, a higher-performance and future-proofed mission requires a more capable and advanced spacecraft," Marshall wrote. The Owl satellites will incorporate an upgraded version of the avionics system developed for the larger Pelican and Tanager satellites, which are being built for high-resolution and hyperspectral imagery, respectively. The initial technology demonstration for Owl is scheduled for late 2026, followed by the deployment of a fleet of spacecraft in the "coming years."
The announcement of the Owl satellites coincides with Planet scaling up production of the larger Pelican satellites. The company revealed on Sept. 25 its plans to establish a second factory for Pelican satellites in Berlin to "better meet growing demand from the European market" by doubling production rate for these spacecraft.
Schingler also addressed the company's vertically integrated approach to satellite production. “That’s really showing the immaturity of the space segment today. It’s really a community today. It’s not a huge, efficient, competitive, interoperable market.”
“I don’t want to be vertically integrated. We’ve had to be vertically integrated because the maturity of the supply chain wasn’t there,” he said, citing long lead times for avionics as a key factor driving in-house production. He expressed a desire for the space industry to evolve into a more efficient and reliable market, similar to the semiconductor industry. "I think the future for us is to be a true market, a true industry," he said, emphasizing the need for a robust supply chain that can deliver components quickly. “That’s what I really wish for the ecosystem, to turn into an industry where you don’t have to be vertically integrated.”