Yet another Hacker News

108 points marklit 4 hours ago 21 comments

Avicebron 4 hours ago | parent

Refreshingly doesn't feel like AI. If someone asked me "what does software engineering look like", I would point to this.

ge96 4 hours ago | parent

This is cool, learned of two new file extensions: .tle and .parquet

coinfused 1 hour ago | parent

I am using DuckDB + Parquet + HTTP range requests for a current project and it's a great combination for data exploration tools that run in the browser.

smallerfish 3 hours ago | parent

I wish Planet had better pricing for nonprofits. I co-run a conservation nonprofit focused on deforestation in Latin America, and our affordable choices are between 2 year old Google Earth imagery, 10m resolution Nimbo imagery (ok, but not sufficiently detailed to be evidentiary), and Sentinel 1 SAR data, which is useful but very noisy. Planet quoted us something like $30k per year for a strip of coastline that represents something like 5% of the territory we're monitoring, so it's just not a viable option under their current pricing model.

marklit 3 hours ago | parent

What sort of budget does your org support?

I had to look into ~19 imagery firms for some telco work in Canada last year.

There are private jets that can capture 10cm imagery and can pick the ideal weather window to fly in.

There are also firms that fly balloons 20 - 80 KM off the ground that can capture 4cm imagery.

The space is pretty busy.

smallerfish 3 hours ago | parent

We're volunteer driven and currently rely on personal donations, so we're scrappy. We could probably justify somewhere in the region of $10k/yr. The jets/balloon angle is interesting, thanks - hadn't occurred to me, and I'll search through what's out there.

marklit 3 hours ago | parent

See if you can negotiate reselling the imagery they sell you. It might be hard to get agreement with this as the vendor will have you both as a customer and compeditor but if you pull it off, you could recoup your costs and then some. For a few weeks, no one else in the private sector will have the freshness and/or quality of imagery you do.

embedding-shape 3 hours ago | parent

> The jets/balloon angle is interesting

Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but what about drones? Probably would have to get permits most likely, but still might be cheaper than alternatives (although balloons are hard to beat when it comes to costs, not always reusable though).

marklit 2 hours ago | parent

Drones (and helicopters) do have their market as well. A lot of engineering firms I saw would go with one of these two, depending on the situation.

Scoundreller 2 hours ago | parent

How many years away are we from a cheap drone that will takeoff, land, solar recharge, repeat until it returns to you a few weeks later with a few tb of SD cards of high res imagery?

notahacker 30 minutes ago | parent

A lot of the barriers are regulatory in the Western world. In rainforests you might not have to worry about that, but there aren't many shade free spots to land

smallerfish 2 hours ago | parent

We do use a drone when we know of a site where deforestation has taken place. The gap we're trying to fill is early detection of forest intervention, so that we can alert appropriate agencies (who are generally under-resourced) and get an inspection to take place while activity is ongoing.

sveme 2 hours ago | parent

Really busy, from satellite constellation tasking to planet and co basemaps to the sentinel family to aerial imagery to helicopters, drones and even blimps.

They all have their unique combination of cost, resolution, area coverage, revisit rate and spectral modes. Quite difficult sometimes to find a good fit for the underlying problem. What‘s clear is that resolution and revisit rate correlate with cost. Shit‘s expensive.

notahacker 1 hour ago | parent

Have you discussed requirements with their account managers? They can be a little more creative than their list prices when they realise you don't have the budget for the data you ideally need but are a potential source of recurring revenue. And the EO market is getting more competitive...

If you are looking for evidentiary purposes, does the Sentinel-1 + Nimbo data give you enough to filter the forest-wide data down to specific areas of interest you might want more spatial/temporal resolution? (or as a former colleague once put it when looking for evidence of more localised and heterogenous environmental damage "to find the needle in the haystack, you first remove the haystack"). Particularly if identifying specific areas of interest is a potential route for you to escalate to another party with an active interest and bigger budget...

Your other route to the commercial data you ideally want would be via partnership with EO consultancies with publicly funded R&D projects to showcase their capabilities (easier if you're European, but not a prerequisite). ESA, for example, devotes a lot of funding for private consortia to demonstrate that Copernicus data (coupled with other data where necessary) yields useful results...

It's a while since I worked in this field (in a non-technical role) but happy to share what I learned in more detail - email in profile.

noodlesUK 46 minutes ago | parent

I have no business other than as a customer but we’ve had decent success with getting cheap archive imagery at fairly high res out of SkyWatch. It’s worth a look. If you need a very large area the price will grow quite a lot though.

ricardobeat 3 hours ago | parent

Are most of their currently operating satellites servicing Flock - the US surveillance company? Or is it just a naming accident?

mandevil 3 hours ago | parent

Flock is Planet Labs name for the mega-constellation of imaging satellites made up of 3U cubesats known as Doves- hence the name for the full constellation. It has nothing to do with the automated license plate reader company.

marklit 3 hours ago | parent

Their satellites have nothing to do with the street-level surveillance camera firm.

hangonhn 3 hours ago | parent

The latter I would think. I can see how you can confuse the two. The reason I think otherwise is because you don't name the satellite after one client, especially if you're in the business of selling images/data, not satellites. And a flock of satellites make sense for a name.

CrzyLngPwd 1 hour ago | parent

Pictured with three of the worst russophobes and most rabid euro warmongers.

Such a shame.

maelito 44 minutes ago | parent

Also checkout https://nlnet.nl/project/Mapterhorn-imagery for planet high-def satellite PMtiles. Not yet released.