Planet Labs Satellite Images Now Available to Ukrainian Agribusiness

The most distinctive feature of agribusiness today is the opportunity to combine the intuition and experience of professional agronomists with high technologies that capture subtle changes in the field. The AgriChain company takes monitoring of the state of crops to a qualitatively new level and is one of the first in Ukraine to start cooperation with Planet Labs, the flagship of monitoring the earth’s surface from space.

“From now on, in order to monitor the state of crops, the level of vegetation, the quality of seedlings in the fields of Astarta, AgriChain will use not only the usual market images from Sentinel-2 satellites, which are used by most companies, but will cooperate with the company Planet Labs. And this is only the beginning of cooperation based on Astarta’s capabilities. In the future, we plan to expand cooperation and provide services for other market participants on a commercial basis. But more on that later,” says Nataliya Bogacheva, director of the AgriChain company.

Planet Labs is an American private company founded by former NASA employees back in 2010. It explores the Earth’s surface with the help of miniature CubeSat satellites. These are small-sized satellites with a cubic shape of 10x10x10 cm³, weighing no more than 1.33 kg, which are delivered to orbit as payloads of other space objects. Each such satellite has its own name, but in general they are called dove. Their fleet of over 200 Earth-imaging satellites is the largest in the history of observing our planet.

Each “pigeon” is equipped with a powerful telescope, camera and modern software for filming different areas of the earth’s surface. All satellites carry out continuous imaging of the Earth, which makes it possible to obtain daily images of the surface with a resolution of up to 3.5 meters per pixel.

Planet Labs provides daily satellite data that helps companies, governments, researchers and journalists understand the physical world and take action. Therefore, AgriChain’s cooperation with Planet Labs is capable of revolutionizing the monitoring of the vegetation of the Astarta fields, because for the agronomic service, such high-quality and frequent images provide an opportunity to more effectively analyze the general state of the field, identify problem areas, evaluate the dynamics of the quality of technological operations, forecast the planned yield, analyze the impact of weather conditions, natural phenomena or natural disasters and promptly make management decisions.