Planet Labs has announced that its Pelican-11 demonstration satellite will launch next month.
Pelican-11 will serve as a testbed for Planet’s second generation of Pelican Earth Observation satellites.
The spacecraft is due for launch on the SpaceX Transporter-17 rideshare mission, no earlier than 30 July.
While Planet’s first-generation Pelicans can capture 50cm-class imagery, the second generation will be able to image at 30cm resolution.
Pelican-11 is not expected to produce commercially available data; rather, it will serve as testbed for new technologies.
The satellite was transported to the launch site at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at the beginning of this month.
Planet Labs launches three more Pelican satellites
Last month, Planet Labs released the first imagery from its most recent launch of a trio of Pelican satellites.
The images shown high-resolution detail of Gotland in Sweden, Taiyuan in China and Ambursu in Nigeria. They were taken from altitudes of just over 500 kilometres.
“Launching three more Pelicans gives us more capacity and a higher revisit rate for our customers,” said Will Marshall, Co-Founder and CEO of Planet Labs.
“We’re pleased to be launching these at pace, and it’s always exciting to see first light imagery so swiftly after launch!”
Sweden’s first sovereign Earth observation satellite
One of the three satellites belongs to Sweden, becoming the Swedish Armed Forces’ first-ever sovereign Earth observation satellite.
“Launching Sweden’s first satellite is a major milestone, and we’re grateful to Planet for helping extend the Swedish Armed Forces’ capabilities into the space domain,” said Anders Sundeman, Rear Admiral and Head of Space at the Swedish Armed Forces.
“Sweden will now have its own sovereign means of identifying and analysing threats globally — far ahead of our initial 2030 goal.
“We have a great cooperation with Planet on this critical work and look forward to more launches to come.”
Planet now has nine AI-enabled, high-resolution Pelican satellites in orbit.
