Sourcery
00:05:54 · Molly O'Shea, S0
[00:05:54] S1: I understand. [00:05:56] S0: So so basically, all of this electronics tells you where the satellite is in space. That's the GPS. Where it's pointing with a star camera, the sun sensors. Mhmm. And then we take a series of pictures, and then we embed that metadata on that picture so that we know where we're pointing. And then we stitch that to the Earth's surface. Now we have about 200 of these in orbit. They image the entire Earth every day. It's the only system that does that, that images the whole Earth. [00:06:23] S1: And how many images do you do a day, and what is the file size of a shot? [00:06:27] S0: 4,000,047 megapixel images, basically. So it's of order, I think, a 100 terapixels. Oh my god. Yeah. And eight spectral bands for every pixel. So it's actually... It's kind of eight pictures for every point on the Earth's surface with different colors, but not just the three that we have, RGB and our eye Mhmm. Red, green, blue, but we have eight spectral bands that cover near infrared into the optical wavelengths. [00:06:52] S1: And so for people who might be newer to Planet Labs, why is image data so important maybe versus like radio occultation data?
00:06:52 · Molly O'Shea, S0
[00:06:52] S1: And so for people who might be newer to Planet Labs, why is image data so important maybe versus like radio occultation data? [00:07:00] S0: Well, there's all sorts of data that you can get from space. Imagery is of course super useful because it is the kind of data that we can visually interpret. We're visual creatures, right? You name it, we can see it, we can understand it. Also, there's a huge amount of work in visual language models now. So graduating from the machine learning things that we're doing, recognizing cats and dogs in videos online, can now recognize buildings and ships and planes and trains or whatever it is that you're trying to find. So AI is very ready for it just like we're very ready to look at it. Of course, we can't look at 4,000,000 images per day. So we're using machines to do most of the heavy lifting there. Okay. Do wanna hold it? Sure. [00:07:47] S1: Oh my god. [00:07:48] S0: What do you think? No. Not. No. Don't drop it. Actually, if you dropped it, it won't be so bad because that is more or less dropping it from about [00:07:54] S1: your jobs is to throw this against the wall.
00:07:54 · Molly O'Shea, S0
[00:07:54] S1: your jobs is to throw this against the wall. [00:07:56] S0: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. I'll demonstrate in a second. But actually dropping it from about this height onto a a marble floor is about the equivalent of the shock loads that it it it takes on when it it... When the two stages of a rocket separate. Yeah. It's... That's intense. Yes. 200 gs's. It's extremely intense. One of the hard things about designing these satellites is not just that it needs to work, but it needs to work through the launch, is 15 gs's shaking. 200 gs's bolt, shot loads, and then in the thermal environment of space. So where we're going from minus 40 degrees C to plus 20 degrees C every forty five minutes. I mean, that's much colder than your new freezer, much hotter than stay, sort of oscillation. And this telescope must stay in focus for that whole time. Even movement of a fraction of a wavelength would put this out of focus. So this thing has to survive those shocks, survive that thermal environment, and stay in focus. So the difficulty is not so much the fundamental optic design, but how do you encase it in a system that will survive all of that load? [00:09:03] S1: Right. And so the first version that you had, you put I'll put this down. [00:09:07] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Sure. You put [00:09:09] S1: a phone up in just
00:09:09 · Molly O'Shea, S0
[00:09:09] S1: a phone up in just [00:09:10] S0: a minute? Yeah. This was a slightly catastrophic, event, as you can see. Basically, we put this phone onto a suborbital rocket. We were trying to show... Well, basically, let me step back one sec. Okay. Someone at NASA kept on saying when we were there, why are we spending a billion dollars on a satellite when a phone like this has most of what a satellite has, but it costs $500. Right. It has GPS. So what [00:09:36] S1: was the answer to that?
00:09:38 · S0
[00:09:38] S0: It didn't need to cost a billion dollars. Phones work just fine in space. Now this first test did not work, but amazingly, all of the the phone electronics have survived. We managed to get all the data, and and this just showed the case in point that even though this is a failed launch, these things are incredibly robust. They're designed exactly for you to drop it on the floor and it not break because people do shit like that. So, it actually was a surprising example of just how robust consumer electronics are. See what happened back in the 60s and 70s and 80s, NASA was pioneering all this technology because it had to. To go to the moon, you had to put a capsule with humans in it, you had to have computers, so they had to sort of develop microprocessors in order to get a computer that's small enough because computers were the size of a building. They had to pioneer solar panels and various other technology in order to get it done. So they're used to the idea of building everything themselves because they couldn't go down to, you know, fries or whatever and get the component. They didn't exist. You couldn't buy batteries that they needed. You couldn't buy computers that they needed. They couldn't buy solar panels. So they invented it all. So NASA had a mentality of inventing everything. Now it did incredible things as a result, but now the consumer electronics, the electronics that we have in our back pocket, are far superior to what they had. And the dominant R and D is being spent by Apple and Google and whoever on developing these electronics to be better and better. So we took the attitude of instead of developing all of that, let's take the best stuff that's already being developed commercially and use that for space. Learning to follow the consumer electronics industry rather than trying to pioneer everything. And that whole approach, use cheap electronics that we can buy online, and then, by the way, throw up a few more than we need, and if one or two of the satellites breaks, no big deal. Totally different risk attitude to what NASA did. And that also enabled us to just reduce the cost by about three orders of magnitude, which is, you know, a big deal for any sector. I do. You know? It's a bit like the mainframe computers to desktop computer revolution.
00:11:56 · S0, Molly O'Shea
And all the applications we have with desktops now are completely different than what we did with a few mainframes, one per country or whatever, you know? So I [00:12:06] S1: have endless questions. I guess before I get to all of them, what is the biggest difference between, okay, v one, we're putting a phone up into space to one of these going up there to what we're about to see right now? [00:12:19] S0: Okay. So one way to think about it is how much data they're producing and getting down to the ground. When we first launched the first satellite, some of which are here, various parts, they would produce... Get data rates down about a megabit a second. So we take lots of pictures, we dump it down with a radio that's going about a megabit a second. Well, if you're taking 47 megapixel images, you can't get very much data down at that rate. In fact, the cut... So now our data is about two gigabits a second, so about a thousand times better. That means we're roughly getting a thousand times more data than the first ones per satellite, per unit time. So huge increases in the amount of data. And that's what enabled us to get to this first mission one, we called it, of imaging the whole earth every day.