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terra bella

Sale of Terra Bella to Planet now official

February 6, 2017

Last month we reported on a rumour that Google’s parent company, Alphabet, was selling their satellite imaging company Terra Bella to another satellite imaging company Planet. It is now official as announced on both the Planet Blog and Terra Bella’s home page (which directs you to the Planet Blog article). Terra Bella was formerly SkyBox Imaging and was acquired by Google in 2014.

The announcement says that the deal includes a multi-year contract between Planet and Google whereby Google will purchase Earth-imaging data from Planet. What we don’t know is what Google plans to do with the imagery. Do any of our readers know? We have not seen much in the way of Terra Bella imagery in Google Earth. We have seen some imagery from them in cases of disaster response. We assume Terra Bella has a number of corporate customers, but presumably those will stay with Terra Bella – becoming Planet customers.

Google Earth would actually benefit from Terra Bella imagery in areas where it doesn’t yet have high resolution imagery – which is actually quite a lot of places, typically hard to photograph areas such as the far north or tropical rain forests with near permanent cloud cover. Another opportunity would be more global mosaics, but this time using higher resolution Planet imagery rather than the relatively low resolution Landsat / Sentinel-2 imagery.

Over the last few years, Planet has become the world leader in medium resolution, high frequency satellite imagery. They have 60 medium resolution satellites (3-5m per pixel). That is set to more than double this Valentine’s Day when they plan to launch another 88 all at once. They also own the Rapid Eye satellites (five satellites with approx. 5m per pixel resolution) which they acquired in 2015. Terra Bella has 7 sub-metre resolution satellites and plans to launch many more. In contrast, the other major players in the Satellite imaging business have fewer satellites but higher resolution (down to 25cm per pixel in some cases).

Filed Under: Site News Tagged With: planet, terra bella

Is Google selling Terra Bella to Planet?

January 12, 2017

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.

Filed Under: Site News Tagged With: Planet labs, terra bella

WorldView-4 and SkySat launches

September 15, 2016

The next couple of days will see two significant launches for satellite imaging. If all goes well, the first launch will be four SkySat satellites owned by Google’s Terra Bella. They are expected to launch with a Peruvian reconnaissance satellite aboard a European Vega rocket. See the count down clock and more launch details here. The launch takes place from ZLV, Kourou, French Guiana. Next will be WorldView-4. It is a DigitalGlobe satellite with similar specifications to WorldView-3, the current leader in high resolution commercial satellite imagery. According to spaceflightnow.com the launch is scheduled to take place from SLC-3E, Vandenberg Air Force Base, California.

[ Update: We didn’t realise at the time of writing that PerĂºSAT-1 which is being launched together with the SkySat satellites is also an Earth observation satellite with a resolution of 70 cm per pixel panchromatic and 2 m per pixel for colour. Learn more about it here]

We already looked at WorldView-4 last month, so today we are focusing on the SkySat satellites. Those being launched today are SkySats 4 through 7. SkySat 1 was launched in November 2013, SkySat-2 in July 2014 and SkySat-3 in June 2016. We have seen imagery from them a number of times, including imagery of the damage caused by Italy’s recent earthquake, a poppy display at the Tower of London and the Burning Man festival. We also once came across a SkySat image in the Sahara, which has since disappeared from Google Earth.

The SkySat satellites have an imagery resolution of about 90 cm per pixel. This is not as good as WorldView-4’s 30 cm per pixel, but is better than Planet Lab’s Dove satellites, which have a resolution of 3-5 m per pixel. It is also better resolution than the best imagery Google Earth currently has for some locations, so we hope Google considers using Terra Bella imagery to fill in the gaps in Google Earth.

Unlike SkySats 1 and 2, SkySat-3 has propulsion, which gives it greater flexibility in capturing images. Presumably 4 thorough 7 also have propulsion. Read more about the differences between SkySat’s 1 and 2 and SkySat-3 here.


The SkySat satellites being prepared for launch as tweeted by CNES. Image credit ESA-CNES-ARIANESPACE.

Filed Under: Site News Tagged With: digitalglobe, skysat, terra bella, worldview-4



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