Airbus and Planet join forces to bring new geospatial products to market

Toulouse, 25 June 2018 – Airbus and Planet have entered into a partnership to facilitate access to each other’s data and the co-development of new geospatial solutions, by establishing a framework agreement to explore opportunities for joint cooperation in new and existing markets, product offerings, sales and marketing efforts. Both partners aim at providing a comprehensive suite of global satellite data at multiple temporal and spatial resolutions, and developing new analytic products for a wide range of applications to the benefit of their customers.

“By combining our strengths, we will provide a key capability to address all market needs, both in terms of data and value-added products, and to best serve our clients, whatever their industry and their requirements,” said François Lombard, Director of the Intelligence Business at Airbus Defence and Space.

“Airbus and Planet are truly complementary partners. Airbus brings long-standing success in serving reliable, high resolution remote sensing, and Planet brings its unique global coverage and temporal cadence, as well as agile aerospace iteration to get sensors quickly to space,” said Will Marshall, CEO and co-founder of Planet. “Together we will be able to deliver sophisticated offerings to fit customer needs across international markets.”

The partnership reflects the high-value assets of each provider and their synergies for addressing ever-growing, demanding needs for continuous monitoring and accurate information. Benefitting from both companies’ constellations, customers will have access to the entire Earth's landmass every day at 3m resolution with PlanetScope satellites, as well as to intra-daily sub-meter resolution imagery with Pléiades and SkySat constellations. In addition, they will also have the capability to order images with resolutions of 1.5m (SPOT 6/7), 5m (Rapideye) and 22m (DMC Constellation). Lastly, TerraSAR-X, TanDEM-X and PAZ radar satellites will allow the acquisition of images regardless of weather and daylight conditions, ensuring access to any place on Earth independent of the cloud coverage.

Airbus further strengthens its Earth observation imagery portfolio with the addition of TripleSat satellite data

Toulouse, 10 April 2018 – Airbus has entered into an agreement with Twenty First Century Aerospace Technology Co. Ltd (21AT), the Chinese commercial satellite operator, for the distribution of the images acquired by their TripleSat constellation.

The TripleSat constellation consists of three identical very high-resolution Earth observation satellites set 120° apart, travelling around the same orbit. They offer daily monitoring of any place on Earth revealing details as small as 80 centimetres. The satellites were specifically designed to map large area coverage and will therefore reinforce the Pléiades and SPOT satellite capacities, improving access to information in critical situations.

On the optical side, Airbus’ constellation already comprises the very high-resolution Pléiades 1A and 1B, the high-resolution SPOT 6 and SPOT 7 satellites as well as the DMC constellation. On the radar side, weather-independent satellites such as TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X were recently joined by the PAZ radar satellite. The constellation is also reinforced by satellite partners such as KazEOSat. These partnerships complement the offering and service for demanding applications.