SkySat 50cm Release

Introduction 

• Planet released SkySat 50cm resolution in June of 2020.

Summary

• Through a variety of orbital and ground system improvements, Planet is improving both the SkySat basic and Ortho product spatial resolutions. By lowering the SkySat orbits from 500km to 450km altitude, and various processing improvements, the basic product spatial resolution will now be 65 cm at nadir for super-res assets, and 81 cm at nadir for non super-resolution assets. The Ortho product will now be resampled to 50 cm spatial resolution, to support additional processing improvements and lower SkySat orbits in the near future. 

• The archive up to June 30, 2020 will retain 72 cm basic product resolution (at nadir), however when customers reactivate archive ortho assets for download, they will be reproduced with 50 cm resolution.

• The Basic product resolution improves from 72 cm to 65 cm (at nadir) – due to orbit lowering
• The Ortho product resolution improves from 80 cm to 50 cm – due to orbit lowering and ortho resampling
• The Analytic products may now match native sensor resolution (rather than the previous NOAA restricted 1 m minimum)
• Scene and Collect file sizes increase by ~3x
• Minimum swath width decreases from 6.6 km to 5.9 km