ST. LOUIS — The info analytics firm Royce Geo used imagery from Planet Labs and vessel-tracking information from Spire satellites to uncover illicit oil trading by Russian tankers across the globe.
The evaluation published May 16 also found that more tankers coming from Russian ports at the moment are heading towards Chinese export destinations.
Using artificial intelligence techniques to extract ships and classify tankers inside satellite images, the corporate was in a position to explain how Russia continues to export oil and natural gas products while most nations have imposed sanctions and price caps.
One other analytics and AI company, Windward, combined vessel tracking data with Planet imagery to report on the alleged laundering of Ukrainian grain by Russian dark vessels.
These are examples of how Planet works with partners to “get value out of our data,” Kevin Weil, Planet’s president of product and business, told .
“Now we have lots of of satellites in space. We image the entire planet on daily basis. So we’ve this history of the world that is essentially recording anything that has modified over the past almost seven years,” Weil said.
Satellites owned by private firms like Planet have played an unexpectedly essential role within the war in Ukraine, demonstrating the capabilities of business satellites to deliver crucial intelligence.
The industry, nevertheless, worries that much of the worth of the info collected by satellites and archived every day stays untapped.
“I feel Planet’s is probably the most underutilized dataset on this planet,” Weil said.
Planet is working with Microsoft to create a so-called PlanetGPT using AI to make satellite data more accessible by indexing it, and making it searchable and conversational, Weil said.
“Considered one of the explanations I’m enthusiastic about that’s it’s for the primary time we’re in a position to not only construct individual models to extract what’s happening on this planet, but potentially construct a more general model that we’ll give you the chance to question with natural language and more quickly get answers across a wide range of scenarios,” he said.
Becoming an information company
Planet last quarter reported significant growth in revenue. Going forward, the corporate is reshaping itself to be greater than an Earth remark firm and turn out to be a knowledge and data provider, said Robert Cardillo, chairman of the board of Planet Federal.
Cardillo, a former director of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA), oversees the federal government arm of Planet Labs. His message to customers is “tell us what insights you wish and allow us to determine find out how to provide it.”
Planet last 12 months won a $146 million contract from the National Reconnaissance Office to provide electro-optical imagery. The corporate is working to expand its reach in the federal government market, Cardillo said. Planet has signed various cooperative research and development agreements, generally known as CRADAs, with government agencies to explore ways to extract insights from Planet’s archive.
NGA and other defense agencies are gaining more confidence in industrial data but there are still “structural inhibitors” that decelerate the adoption of business solutions, Cardillo said.
Some agencies still don’t trust industrial data but “I’m really optimistic,” he said. “That is an interactive system. Industrial industry sometimes pushes, and sometimes the federal government is within the lead due to their capabilities, but I’m just really pleased with the interactions.”
Discussions about what the longer term holds for the geospatial intelligence industry will happen this week on the GEOINT 2023 symposium held in downtown St. Louis, not removed from where NGA is constructing a brand new campus generally known as NGA West.
NGA industrial Initatives
James Griffith, director of business operations at NGA, said the agency is on the lookout for higher ways to make the most of private sector innovation.
The agency, for instance, is using data and analytics services from industrial providers under the Economic Indicator Monitoring, or EIM program, where firms compete for task orders to watch global activity and deliver insights on economic trends. The primary round of contracts was price $29 million and the following will grow to $60 million due to a congressional add-on.
“In five to 10 years, data will not be going to be our problem. There may be a lot data. What I’m hoping to see and we’re attempting to encourage is the event of more analytics services, things that make sense of that data for users who aren’t specialists,” Griffith said in April at Planet’s users conference in Washington, D.C.
As a part of NGA’s intelligence support to the Defense Department, he said, “we’re required to watch hundreds of airfields each month. Wouldn’t it’s great if we had a service that did that monitoring for us that was reliable, and as a part of the service, they supply an alert that something’s modified?”
“Those are the sorts of services that I feel can be of real value to the community,” Griffith said, “and the info already exists.”
Cardillo, an early proponent of the EIM program when he ran NGA, agreed that there needs to be higher ways for the federal government to tap industrial capabilities. Once an agency decides what information it wants, he said, “we get the algorithm tuned and, working with the archive, we are able to provide weekly or every day reports.”
Planet teamed with Microsoft to evaluate constructing damage in Ukraine attributable to the war. Weil said the important thing was to coach the models to discover different objects like schools, hospitals and military installations.
“It took us a month or so to do the primary evaluation in Ukraine,” said Weil. “After which when the earthquake happened in Turkey, it took us two days because we had refined the models and we had the processes in place,” he said. “That is the form of thing that EIM goes after. It’s a training ground and then you definately automate and iterate and move much faster in the longer term.”
To assist unlock more applications and uses of archival data, Planet launched a startup program offering discounted access to Planet data for research, product development and prototyping. Weil said the corporate desires to democratize access to satellite data and reduce technical barriers.