Previous generation of Doves (instrument ids PS2 and PS2.SD) imaging turned off¶

On March 1, 2022 Planet released the next generation of Planet Scope images that consist of near daily 8-band imagery. Planet has been maintaining near-daily 8-band coverage coverage since August, 2021. With the recent successful launch of 44 8-band Doves, Planet has made the decision to turn off imaging with the previous generation of Doves (Instrument ids PS2 and PS2.SD) that only consists of 4-Bands (RGBNIR). The goal is to optimize for 8-band coverage and allocate all available ground station resources to improve publication time of 8-band imagery.

For more information on PlanetScope constellation and sensors, see PlanetScope documentation.

For an overview of PlanetScope sensors, see Understanding PlanetScope Instruments.

Improvements 🙌🏻¶

UDM and UDM2 files for SkySatScene and SkySatCollect items now set to clear for Panchromatic without Multispectral coverage

UDM and UDM2 assets for SkySatScene and SkySatCollect item types have been slightly adjusted to include data values where we have Panchromatic but no Multispectral coverage, resulting in no cloud mask information. These areas, previously marked as nodata, are now to be marked as valid, with a cloud classification of clear with a confidence of 1 (the lowest).

Going forward, fast-publish asset provisioning (reference L1A in Planet's imagery spec) will be AOI based, in that only the scenes that overlap the customers’ AOIs will be available for view and download by the customer. The final ortho assets will continue to be provisioned for the full overlapping SkySatCollect segment.

Additionally, only the SkySatCollect segments that overlap the tasking customers’ AOIs will be available for view and download by the customer. Hence, if a SkySat capture is broken up into multiple SkySatCollect segments, only those that overlap the customer’s AOI will be provisioned to them.

Planet updated the way that it selects and composites SkySat "anchor frames" or Scenes. Hence now SkySatCollects which would have previously faulted or been truncated due to faulty anchor frame selection will now publish to their full extent, potentially allowing gaps in the imagery. Note, faulty imagery will publish to the archive, however will not qualify to fulfill revenue orders.

The resolution limit over Israel has been updated from 2m to 0.4m, hence full resolution SkySat products may now be produced over Israel. This applies to both new captures and archive imagery.