Sourcery
00:13:07 · Molly O'Shea, S0
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00:14:43 · Molly O'Shea, Molly O'Shea, S0
Ad[00:14:43] S2: zonefrontier.com to learn more. [00:14:47] S1: Let's let's go take a look inside. Yeah. I know you and your team work very closely together between manufacturing, testing, production, all that. So how how do they communicate with one another? What's the flow here? [00:15:03] S0: Well, we build all the satellites here. You'll see some of it. We're actually gonna first go into the place where we build the biggest satellites. Now, all of this is done on these sort of automated test stands. This gentleman here is working on them. These guys here. And they they build all the subsystems. That all comes together into this main clean room area, which you see here, which we can actually put our hair nets on and go in, so that we can actually see one of the satellites. They're a bit bigger than the... Those first ones because these ones, as I was mentioning, trying to get to a much higher resolution on the ground. So... And I don't know if you were asking about how they communicate with each other, but we can talk about that. But basically, each satellite dumps its data to the ground stations, but we've got 48 of those ground stations all around the world. You have [00:15:48] S1: your own ground stations?
00:15:48 · Molly O'Shea, S0
[00:15:48] S1: your own ground stations? [00:15:49] S0: Yes. We built... Basically, no one had that either. You can't get that So basically, we built about... I think it is 48 or so of these parabolic dish antennas Yeah. Doing dual SNX band in a a few dozen locations. We often have four or eight of these ground stations at any one location because we have so many satellites. There's many to look at at any one time, even in the same spot. And we're... So we're... And they're in Alaska, Northern Canada, Northern Norway, Southern Tip Of New Zealand, Southern Tip Of Australia. So basically, the highest latitude locations because our satellites are mainly in polar orbits, and so they get much more contact points than closer your station is to the pole. So we put them as far north and south as possible with an Internet connection because we have to get all that data back, obviously. [00:16:44] S1: Okay. So as we go and we look through these, I want to address one thing. All of these satellites are named after birds.
00:16:44 · Molly O'Shea, S0
[00:16:44] S1: Okay. So as we go and we look through these, I want to address one thing. All of these satellites are named after birds. [00:16:52] S0: Yes. Why? Okay. This is actually a space tradition that precedes us, and we were, like, in NASA, there was the Eagle that landed. Obviously, a lot of military missions, like Kestreli or... And we wanted to name ours after birds that were a part of our mission. So Dove's trying to inspire how we're trying to help peace and security around the Earth. Tanager is our hyperspectral satellite, and that's because these are looking out for biodiverse areas. Tanagers are some endangered birds with a lot of different colors in the tropics, so we can track ecosystems. Pelicans are highest resolution systems. That's because they fly really low. They fly so low. Pelicans fly really low because they get a bit of lift off the water when they fly really low. They get a little like 10 or 20% more lift. We can do the same sort of across the top of the atmosphere. So we fly these satellites really low so that we get better resolution on the ground. So we named them after Pelicans because of that. So we'll continue you to name them after cool birds. Oh, our next one is gonna be called Owl. Oh, yeah. So we're launching all these Owls because they've got bigger eyes and they're wise because they have a huge amount of compute on board. So we're naming them after Owls. So we'll keep on doing that. It's just for fun. [00:18:14] S1: Amazing. Okay.
00:18:14 · Molly O'Shea, S0
[00:18:14] S1: Amazing. Okay. [00:18:15] S0: Let's Okay. Get We'll put some hair nets on. Suited up. Yeah. Alright. So we're going into the clean room to see some of the bigger satellites. You're hair netted up. You look cool. We look cool. Let's go. Alright. So, yeah. So in here, we actually build the satellites, the bigger satellites. That's a stand for one of the satellites here. Can You actually see these are the solar panels that will be attached to these bigger satellites. This is a bus of one of the bigger satellites. So that's the, core spacecraft components. That does the attitude determination and control. It does the propulsion. It does the radio communications. The propulsion, I think, is on the bottom. And so basically, all of that harness held... Holds the payload, which is a huge telescope that looks down. Mhmm. So most of the volume is taken up with that. Then somewhere around here, we have one of the actual satellites. Oh, actually, this is a bit of fun. You can see there the optics, the primary optics [00:19:15] S1: Oh, yeah.
00:19:15 · Molly O'Shea, S0
[00:19:15] S1: Oh, yeah. [00:19:16] S0: There. That is the big telescope looking down. So that gives you a sense of the scale. But here's the spacecraft that we're gonna look at. So this is Pelican-ten. So it's one of our highest resolution satellites. So this this is now integrated. It has the telescope inside of it. So here you can see at the back, this is the propulsion system. You can see this is the feeder. These are the two main tanks. This is the pressurant tank, of that propulsion system. So that's the back end. The telescope is that this is the connection that goes to the rocket here and then and then these are star cameras that are actually hidden enclosed so that they, we don't get dust in them. And, the telescope is inside of here. You can't really see it. So it's all wrapped up in this main section. Wow. Any questions? [00:20:15] S1: Yeah. A lot. [00:20:16] S0: Go on then. [00:20:17] S1: Okay. So Planet Labs is vertically integrated. So how many of these components are you building in house versus which parts are not as Yeah. Kind of