by Clarence Oxford
Los Angeles CA (SPX) Jun 11, 2024
Planet Labs PBC (NYSE: PL), a provider of daily data and insights about Earth, announced a collaboration with NVIDIA to enhance onboard processing capabilities for its Pelican-2 satellite. Planet will use the NVIDIA Jetson edge AI platform for its next-generation high-resolution mission and will fly the technology on its Pelican-2 satellite, launching later this year.
NVIDIA GPU accelerated computing will support intelligent imaging and faster insights for customers. This collaboration aims to shorten the time to value for customers in government and commercial markets.
"Robust datasets are what power AI, and Planet is fully embracing the latest advancements happening in this AI revolution, from enhancing our satellite technology to pulling insights from our imagery data at rapid speeds," said Kiruthika Devaraj, VP of Avionics and Spacecraft at Planet.
"This collaboration is about getting answers from orbit to our customers in near real-time. The suite of solutions that Planet can generate for our customers with our high-resolution optical sensor on Pelican is enhanced by NVIDIA Jetson and real-time connectivity. With the latest technology demonstrations launching on Pelican-2, our customers and partners will be able to access, process, and download imagery as well as real-time insights at a rapid pace and on low- and high-bandwidth connectivity based on their unique constraints."
"Running compute on-orbit allows us to design new pipelines that can understand the data as it is being collected, without waiting for data download and delivery. Such on-orbit compute will enable many new (and important) capabilities, such as real-time tracking of events like forest fires, disasters, and other events of interest," said Deepak Vasisht, Assistant Professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Planet will be one of the first to space-qualify and fly NVIDIA Jetson on an Earth observation satellite.
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