Pelican Satellite

Pelican is Planet’s next-generation high-resolution Earth observation satellite, representing a major capability upgrade over the SkySat platform. Designed for deployment starting in 2023–2024, Pelican delivers sub-meter imagery with substantially greater collection area capacity and improved temporal performance compared to SkySat, while maintaining Planet’s emphasis on rapid delivery and API-accessible data products.

The Pelican platform features advanced optics, higher downlink throughput, and improved agility for multi-target collection passes — enabling operators to collect more imagery per orbit and respond faster to tasking requests. Pelican is designed to serve both commercial high-resolution analytics customers and defense and intelligence customers requiring rapid, reliable access to high-fidelity imagery of specific locations.

Pelican integrates into Planet’s unified Earth observation system alongside Dove and SkySat, allowing customers to access a multi-resolution hierarchy from daily 3 m context imagery down to sub-50 cm high-resolution collection depending on their application requirements. The constellation is designed for resilience through proliferation, with multiple Pelicans providing redundant collection capacity and continued coverage even if individual satellites experience anomalies.