Planet Labs Announces National Reconnaissance Office Awards it Contract for Hyperspectral Capabilities By Investing.com

Planet Labs PBC (PL), a leading provider of daily data and insights about Earth, today announced that its wholly owned subsidiary, Planet Labs Federal, Inc., has been awarded a contract by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) for the agency’s Strategic Commercial Enhancements (SCE) Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) program, specifically in the Commercial Hyperspectral Capabilities (CHC) focus area.

The multi-phased contract will allow Planet to work directly with the NRO to explore how Planet’s hyperspectral capabilities align with the agency’s national space security architecture. Further, this collaboration will allow the NRO various options to conduct additional activities including, modeling and simulation, evaluating future Planet capabilities, and demonstrating how Planet data may be integrated into the agency’s existing operations.

“Planet is extremely honored to continue as a valued and trusted commercial provider for the NRO,” says Jon Powers, Planet Federal’s General Manager. “This award furthers our ability to work alongside the NRO to better serve the defense and intelligence communities. It also enables the NRO to better analyze and more quickly integrate commercial capabilities into their emerging hybrid space system architecture.”

This contract strongly aligns with Planet’s existing and planned future commercial capabilities with Tanager, a hyperspectral constellation designed as part of a first-of-its-kind public-private partnership with the Carbon Mapper Coalition, with capabilities to detect greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, such as methane, as well as other environmental applications. Planet believes the data eventually collected by Tanager and distributed by Planet, Carbon Mapper, and its partners could help improve accounting and enable mitigation of anthropogenic methane emissions. The highly sensitive payload, developed in partnership with NASA JPL, will also be able to support a number of additional use cases beyond methane. Planet’s hyperspectral payload is anticipated to support the NRO’s mission with a spectral range of 400-2500nm, 5nm bands, and industry leading signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) from the visible through the short wave infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Planet is eager to begin exploring how its hyperspectral data can deliver value through this contract, and looks forward to continuing to build a strong and long-term relationship with the NRO as a commercial provider.