Planet Labs has released the first light images from its Pelican-2 satellite of the Port of Laem Chabang in Eastern Thailand, the primary deep sea port in Thailand. They were taken on March 12, 2025, from an altitude of around 506 km. Pelican-2 launched on SpaceX’s Transporter-12 Rideshare mission on January 14, 2025.
Will Marshall, Co-Founder and CEO of Planet, said: “We’re super pleased with our Pelican-2 first light imagery. The spacecraft is exceeding expectations and is rising to meet the market needs of our customers. Our Pelican fleet offers greater capacity, higher resolution, lower latency, and, with NVIDIA’s most powerful chip onboard, Pelican will be able to do AI processing at the edge. This integration of AI-powered solutions with our precise spatial data is a major leap forward, and is an exciting preview of what’s to come for commercial satellite imagery data in the years ahead.”
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. Pelican-2 provides high-resolution imagery by leveraging 6 multispectral bands that are optimised for cross-sensor analysis with PlanetScope. Pelican-2 will support Planet’s 50 cm tasked imagery product line and is engineered to produce 40 cm class imagery.
Planet has collaborated with Nvidia to equip Pelican-2 with the Nvidia Jetson platform to power on-orbit computing—with the aim of vastly reducing the time between data capture and value for customers. Additional imagery with an increased resolution is expected to be available following the lowering of the spacecraft to its operational altitude and once the spacecraft and the imagery pipelines complete ongoing commissioning and calibration work. Planet plans to launch additional Pelicans this year.
Brian Lewis, Mission Director, Pelican, added: “I’m deeply proud of the Pelican team that made this achievement possible. The data we’re getting back from the early stages of our Pelican-2 satellite proves the technical maturity of this new system, and is a testament to their hard work. Pelican’s ability to reduce downlink latency while improving our image quality and capabilities will help ensure our customers and partners have a seamless tasking experience and can consistently monitor critical changes happening on the ground. This is just the beginning of the high-resolution imagery we plan to more rapidly provide, and we can’t wait to make these capabilities available for a wide range of use cases – from defence and intelligence monitoring to disaster response and more.”
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