The GPC Group and Planet Labs, a satellite imaging company, announce the official signing of their MOU and partnership to serve the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Planet Labs and GPC are also exploring collaboration in other developing regions, Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and other countries where the GPC Group is working.
By 2016 Planet Labs is targeting a capacity to image the Earth’s land surface every 24 hours, using a “flock” of over 170 nano-satellite called “doves” – giving us unprecedented information about our rapidly changing planet. It represents a significant paradigm shift in the traditional earth observation satellite approach whereby an end-user purchases a “scene” which is essentially a snapshot of a specific area of interest at a specific point in time, to a web-based API that provides the end-user with a virtual remote telescope to monitor conditions on the ground over a very broad area – on an everyday basis. Daily updated data from any place on Earth is foundational to solving commercial, environmental, and humanitarian challenges. The global sensing and analytics platform unlocks the ability to understand and respond to change at a local and global scale.
Planet Labs CEO Will Marshall said “The GPC Group will prove a valuable partner for Planet Labs. I’m excited to work with their in-house GIS experts and their established network of international partners to pioneer entirely new civic, environmental and commercial use-cases for our growing, global imagery data set.”
Mark Sorensen, President of GPC stated “We are very excited to bring Planet Labs earth imaging capabilities into our work creating “GeoSmart Solutions That Matter” for our clients around the world. The ability to monitor conditions and changes across the planet, ultimately on a daily basis, is going to revolutionize how we manage urban development, water and food security, national security and all other aspects of sustainable, climate-resilient development. We see this as being especially critical for the rapidly developing economy, small island developing states (SIDS), and so-called fragile states where we tend to do much of our work.” “We also believe that Planet Labs approach to “nimble-aerospace” utilizing nano-satellites and rapid development and deployment cycles are going to revolutionize the field and make emerging new capabilities available in record time”.
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