Abstract
Planet currently operates a fleet of over 200 satellites consisting of medium resolution monitoring Dove cubesats and high-resolution tasking Skysats, with future very high resolution and hyperspectral tasking missions in development. The Dove satellites continuously collect images over Earth’s land surface at nadir and have had several design evolutions. The latest design, and the one now comprising the entire fleet of Doves, is the SuperDove. The SuperDove has eight spectral bands, six of which are interoperable with Sentinel-2. This interoperability on a payload level has shaped the approach to radiometric calibration for the SuperDove satellites, allowing us to use nearsimultaneous crossovers with a reference satellite at any location on the Earth.
Interoperability and consistency between all of Planet’s satellites is essential, with both timely commissioning after launch and continuous monitoring of satellite health and calibration accuracy important for maintaining uninterrupted, high quality world coverage. With daily coverage of all land masses and overlapping sun synchronous orbits, hundreds of intersecting crossovers between pairs of SuperDoves in neighboring orbits occur within minutes of each other every day. This presentation will discuss current investigations into leveraging intra-fleet simultaneous crossovers of Planet’s SuperDove satellites for rapid commissioning after launch and ongoing monitoring of satellite health. We present some preliminary results of pairwise comparisons between SuperDoves launched at different times. We also compare commissioning based on Dove-Dove crossovers with the current process using Sentinel-2 as reference.
Leveraging Intra-Fleet Simultaneous Crossovers for Rapid Commissioning and Monitoring of Planet Dove Satellites
Planet currently operates a fleet of over 200 satellites consisting of medium resolution monitoring Dove cubesats and high-resolution tasking Skysats, with future very high resolution and hyperspectral tasking missions in development. The Dove satellites continuously collect images over Earth’s land surface at nadir and have had several design evolutions. The latest design, and the one now comprising the entire fleet of Doves, is the SuperDove. The SuperDove has eight spectral bands, six of which are interoperable with Sentinel-2. This interoperability on a payload level has shaped the approach to radiometric calibration for the SuperDove satellites, allowing us to use nearsimultaneous crossovers with a reference satellite at any location on the Earth.
Interoperability and consistency between all of Planet’s satellites is essential, with both timely commissioning after launch and continuous monitoring of satellite health and calibration accuracy important for maintaining uninterrupted, high quality world coverage. With daily coverage of all land masses and overlapping sun synchronous orbits, hundreds of intersecting crossovers between pairs of SuperDoves in neighboring orbits occur within minutes of each other every day. This presentation will discuss current investigations into leveraging intra-fleet simultaneous crossovers of Planet’s SuperDove satellites for rapid commissioning after launch and ongoing monitoring of satellite health. We present some preliminary results of pairwise comparisons between SuperDoves launched at different times. We also compare commissioning based on Dove-Dove crossovers with the current process using Sentinel-2 as reference.