(Put on sunglasses and leather trench coat, try best Laurence Fishburne voice)
What if I told you there are tens to hundreds of terabytes generated every day? Mountains of data. Waiting to be accessed through websites, brought into applications via APIs, just waiting for machine learning to mine it all.
The sky is full of eyes.
(Fishburne voice off)
Imaging and earth observation (EO), driven by lower cost small satellites, are generating terabytes of information. Every data. Today. Tomorrow. Next Tuesday. Next Tuesday in December. All the time.
Planet, formerly Planet Labs, generates six (6) terabytes of data PER DAY, every day of the week, from its fleet of over 160 satellites. The entire surface of the earth is photographed every day at a resolution of 3 to 5 meters. A smaller set of higher-resolution satellites take detailed images of 1 meter or better resolution in color, with the option for high quality video.
Black Sky has access to 10 high-resolution (meter or better) satellites and plans a constellation of 60 satellites to overfly highly populated areas between 40 to 70 times a day. It is leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS) for delivering advanced insights by combining imagery with news, social media, and sensors to deliver deeper information on an area or topic of interest.
Earlier this year, ICEYE launched its first 3U radar cubesat and is now putting it through its paces. Radar provides imaging at night and through cloud cover. At least three to five other companies are working on their own radar small satellite constellations.
Add in near IR and hyperspectral to swell the mountains of data that are being generated day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.
Terabytes and petabytes of imaging data represent undiscovered opportunities for applications developers and businesses. Just storing, filtering, and processing through all of this information is a Big Data problem requiring machine learning to recognize features and patterns.
Synthesis, the ability to combine different types of imaging and other data like Black Sky is doing with its tools, is only beginning.
Imagine managing a fleet of shipping trucks in the United States. An alert says one container outside of Denver hasn't moved in nearly 45 minutes, thanks to an onboard IoT sensor. Click on the reported location of the container using the IoT GPS data to spin up a "God's eye view." Cloud cover obscures the highway, but radar shows nothing has moved in the last 30 minutes along with a local traffic notification indicating a large accident. Another click or two notify other trucks moving towards the city of the blockage, with business routing AI providing options for alternative roads to avoid the blockage.
Above is just an ad hoc example off the top of my head. Boaters, vacationers, travel agency, retirees, businesses are just a few parties that will benefit from being able to use the mountains of information being built today.
