Tiny satellites that photograph the entire planet, every day | Will Marshall

The Earth needs no introduction.

It needs no introduction in part because the Apollo 17 astronauts,

when they were hurtling around the moon in 1972,

took this iconic image.

It galvanized a whole generation of human beings

to realize that we're on Spaceship Earth,

fragile and finite as it is,

and that we need to take care of it.

But while this picture is beautiful, it's static,

and the Earth is constantly changing.

It's changing on days' time scales with human activity.

And the satellite imagery we have of it today is old.

Typically, years old.

And that's important because you can't fix what you can't see.

What we'd ideally want is images of the whole planet every day.

So, what's standing in our way?

What's the problem?

This is the problem:

Satellites are big, expensive and they're slow.

This one weighs three tons.

It's six meters tall, four meters wide.

It took up the entire fairing of a rocket just to launch it.

One satellite, one rocket.

It cost 855 million dollars.

Satellites like these have done an amazing job

at helping us to understand our planet.

But if we want to understand it much more regularly,

we need lots of satellites,

and this model isn't scalable.

So me and my friends, we started Planet Labs

to make satellites ultra-compact

and small and highly capable.

I'm going to show you what our satellite looks like:

This is our satellite.

This is not a scale model,

this is the real size.

It's 10 by 10 by 30 centimeters,

it weighs four kilograms,

and we've stuffed the latest and greatest electronics

and sensor systems into this little package

so that even though this is really small,

this can take pictures 10 times the resolution of the big satellite here,

even though it weighs one thousandth of the mass.

And we call this satellite "Dove" — Thank you.

(Applause)

We call this satellite "Dove,"

and we call it "Dove" because satellites are typically named

after birds, but normally birds of prey:

like Eagle, Hawk, Swoop, Kill, I don't know,

Kestrel, these sort of things.

But ours have a humanitarian mission,

so we wanted to call them Doves.

And we haven't just built them, though.

We've launched them.

And not just one, but many.

It all started in our garage.

Yes, we built our first satellite prototype in our garage.

Now, this is pretty normal for a Silicon Valley company that we are,

but we believe it's the first time for a space company.

And that's not the only trick we learned from Silicon Valley.

We rapidly prototype our satellites.

We use "release early, release often" on our software.

And we take a different risk approach.

We take them outside and test them.

We even put satellites in space just to test the satellites,

and we've learned to manufacture our satellites at scale.

We've used modern production techniques

so we can build large numbers of them,

I think for the first time.

We call it agile aerospace,

and that's what's enabled us to put so much capability into this little box.

Now, what has bonded our team over the years

is the idea of democratizing access to satellite information.

In fact, the founders of our company, Chris, Robbie and I,

we met over 15 years ago at the United Nations

when they were hosting a conference about exactly that question:

How do you use satellites to help humanity?

How do you use satellites to help people in developing countries

or with climate change?

And this is what has bonded us.

Our entire team is passionate about using satellites to help humanity.

You could say we're space geeks,

but not only do we care about what's up there,

we care about what's down here, too.

I'm going to show you a video

from just four weeks ago of two of our satellites

being launched from the International Space Station.

This is not an animation,

this is a video taken by the astronaut looking out of the window.

It gives you a bit of a sense of scale of our two satellites.

It's like some of the smallest satellites ever

are being launched from the biggest satellite ever.

And right at the end, the solar array glints in the sun.

It's really cool. Wait for it.

Boom! Yeah. It's the money shot.

(Laughter)

So we didn't just launch two of them like this,

we launched 28 of them.

It's the largest constellation of Earth-imaging satellites in human history,

and it's going to provide a completely radical new data set

about our changing planet.

But that's just the beginning.

You see, we're going to launch more than 100 of these satellites

like these over the course of the next year.

It's going to be the largest constellation of satellites in human history.

And this is what it's going to do:

Acting in a single-orbit plane that stays fixed with respect to the sun,

the Earth rotates underneath.

They're all cameras pointed down,

and they slowly scan across as the Earth rotates underneath.

The Earth rotates every 24 hours,

so we scan every point on the planet every 24 hours.

It's a line scanner for the planet.

We don't take a picture of anywhere on the planet every day,

we take a picture of every single place on the planet every day.

Even though we launched these just a couple of weeks ago,

we've already got some initial imagery from the satellites

and I'm going to show it publicly for the first time right now.

This is the very first picture taken by our satellite.

It happened to be over UC-Davis' campus

in California when we turned the camera on.

But what's even cooler is when

we compare it to the previous latest image of that area,

which was taken many months ago.

And the image on the left is from our satellite,

and we see buildings are being built.

The general point is that we will be able to track urban growth as it happens

around the whole world in all cities, every day.

Water as well.

Thank you.

(Applause)

We'll be able to see the extent of all water bodies

around the whole world every day and help water security.

From water security to food security.

We'll see crops as they grow in all the fields

in every farmer's field around the planet every day.

and help them to improve crop yield.

This is a beautiful image that was taken

just a few hours ago when the satellite was flying over Argentina.

The general point is

there are probably hundreds and thousands of applications of this data,

I've mentioned a few, but there's others:

deforestation, the ice caps melting.

We can track all of these things, every tree on the planet every day.

If you took the difference between today's image and yesterday's image,

you'd see much of the world news — you'd see floods and fires and earthquakes.

And we have decided, therefore, that the best thing that we could do with our data

is to ensure universal access to it.

We want to ensure everyone can see it.

Thank you. (Applause)

We want to empower NGOs and companies and scientists and journalists

to be able to answer the questions that they have about the planet.

We want to enable the developer community to run their apps on our data.

In short, we want to democratize access to information about our planet.

Which brings me back to this.

You see, this will be an entirely new global data set.

And we believe that together,

we can help to take care of our Spaceship Earth.

And what I would like to leave you with is the following question:

If you had access to imagery of the whole planet every single day,

what would you do with that data?

What problems would you solve?

What exploration would you do?

Well, I invite you to come and explore with us.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)