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Planet labs

Is Google selling Terra Bella to Planet?

A recent story in the news is a rumour that Google may be planning to sell its satellite imaging business Terra Bella (formerly Skybox Imaging) to satellite imaging company Planet (formerly Planet Labs).

Google acquired Terra Bella, then Skybox Imaging, in mid 2014. At the time, Terra Bella had two satellites, SkySats 1 and 2. It added five more satellites to its constellation in 2016, SkySat 3 in June and then SkySats 4 through 7 in September. It has more launches planned for 2017, with some sources suggesting a fleet of 21 satellites by the end of the year.

It makes sense that Google would choose to sell Terra Bella as it really is not a particularly good fit with its other businesses. Terra Bella specialises in medium resolution satellite imagery – higher resolution than Landsat and Sentinel-2 but lower resolution than DigitalGlobe and CNES/Astrum the two main suppliers of satellite imagery for Google Earth. Terra Bella’s focus is cheap satellites and rapid or regular acquisition (enabled by launching a relatively large number of satellites). This is the exact same market that Planet is in, except Planet currently has a much larger fleet. Planet makes its own cheap satellites it calls Doves. We do not know how many are currently in orbit, but in just one launch last year it deployed 12 at once. You can see some others being launched from the Space Station on Planets Blog. Planet also acquired RapidEye in 2015, which consists of a fleet of five satellites.

We have only once seen a Terra Bella image in Google Earth and it was removed soon after we discovered it. It appeared to have been a test of some sort and was in the middle of the Sahara where Google probably thought nobody would notice it.


A gif animation of the Burning Man festival created by Terra Bella.

Planet Labs progress

In March this year we had a look at Planet Labs, a satellite imaging company whose goal is to use large numbers of small, cheap satellites to image the entire globe as frequently as possible. In this respect they are quite similar to Google’s Skybox Imaging and Satellogic.

Planet Labs is making good progress and expects to achieve daily global coverage some time during 2016. To showcase their imagery they have released a Google Chrome extension called Planet View which is almost identical to Google’s Earth View, that we have looked at in the past.

They have also made available an archive of imagery of the state of California. Access to the imagery is currently controlled and is intended for people wishing do develop applications around the imagery using provided APIs rather than for casual use. However, the imagery itself is being shared under an open license with few restrictions other than the requirement to give proper attribution.

We downloaded an image captured in the same region as the Landsat image we looked at in this post. We are not sure what resolution the imagery is but we would guess about 2 to 3m per pixel. This is not nearly as good as DigitalGlobe imagery that can be better than 30cm per pixel, but considerably better than Landsat imagery at 30m per pixel. For comparison see the same location below seen with a Planet Labs image, Google aerial imagery and a Landsat image.


Planet Labs image.


Google aerial imagery.


Landsat image. Landsat may be capable of slightly better resolution than this as this image was compressed slightly when imported into Google Earth.

The Planet Labs image was provided as a 22Mb tiff file. In converting it to JPEG in order to make it a bit smaller for sharing we ran into the same problem we have with Landsat imagery in that JPEG does not support transparency. It does, however make it ten times smaller, so it is worth it, even though it creates a white background around the image. To see the Planet Labs image in Google Earth download this KML file. To see the Landsat image of the same area for comparison, download this KML file.

The burnt area is much more visible in the Landsat imagery, probably because it uses a different range of light frequencies.

Art from Google Earth Imagery

We have several times looked at satellite imagery that can serve as art. We have also looked at a Chrome extension called Earth View that uses satellite imagery as a background in new tabs in Google Chrome. And we have looked at artwork so large that it can only really be appreciated from aerial or satellite imagery.

Today we are looking at two recent stories of satellite imagery being used for art.

First up is artist Federico Winer who has created stunning artwork by taking satellite imagery and adjusting the colour and luminosity to give it a whole new look. See the full story here and see the artist’s website here.


One of Federico Winer’s artworks. See his website for high resolution versions of his artwork.

The second story is that clothing and design company Betabrand has recently partnered with satellite-maker Planet Labs to produce clothing printed with satellite imagery. See the full story here, or the Planet Labs post here.


A dress with satellite imagery print.

Planet Labs

Last year we had a look at Satellogic, a satellite imaging company that is planning to launch hundreds of imaging satellites. However, they are still in the very early stages of development and have only launched a few experimental satellites.

Today we are looking at Planet Labs a satellite imaging company that has already launched 71 imaging satellites and claim to have the largest such fleet in space. They are focusing on gathering global imagery on a regular basis at a relatively low cost. Their imagery is relatively low resolution, at around 3m, but is improving with each generation. For this reason we are unlikely to be seeing their imagery in Google Earth any time soon, as Google prefers high resolution imagery, preferably aerial imagery, and if that is not available then high resolution satellite imagery, such as Digital Globe’s recent 30cm offering.

In comparison, Google’s SkyBox Imaging has launched only 2 satellites of a planned constellation of 24, but they are capable of sub metre resolution and HD video.

For more see the following TED talk by Will Marshall, the CEO of Planet Labs.