Commercial Platforms
Maxar
Maxar provides access to optical imagery, imagery basemaps, radar imagery, and analysis ready data collected from their constellation of Worldview Satellites through their online access platforms at a cost.
- Securewatch: Cloud based subscription service that gives you on-demand access to the world’s most recent high accuracy high res satellite imagery and analytics. Valuable for mapping, change detection, and disaster response
- Rapid Access Program: Online access to a virtual ground system for time-sensitive missions though a web interface. On demand imagery collection with processing and delivery within six hours of collection.
- Direct Access Program: Level beyond Rapid Access program where user can directly control a Maxar satellite by reserving an access window. This allows a user to task the satellite to an imaging event and receive data in real time. This service is beneficial in time sensitive use cases such as defense or urgent disaster response.
Planet Platform
Planet Platform is an entirely automated, cloud-based imagery and analytics platform that provides access to the datasets captured by their PlanetScope (3.7m RGB & NIR) and SkySat (.5m RGB, NIR, & panchromatic) constellations. With over 15 terabytes of new data every day, Planet Platform provides analysis ready data for download by customers through a web-based API. It directly integrates with leading geospatial platforms including ESRI’s ArcGIS suite, QGIS, and Google Earth Engine.
The most attractive part of Planet’s satellite imagery archive is the high temporal resolution. This frequency allows you to do unique analysis and make more granular change comparisons using Planet Explorer. For imagery and analysis uses, Planet has two APIs available for developers. You can do imagery search, filter, and download through their Data API, and inject Planet imagery’s web tiles and basemaps into your applications through the Tiles and Basemaps API.
Planet’s analysis platform acknowledges that harnessing the data even after acquisition can be challenging as it can require manual and time-intensive processing. This platform gives users access to insights from Planet imagery by leveraging automated, cloud-based, and global-scale Planet Analytic Feeds. The platform provides Planet Basemaps and mosaics that are suited for machine learning where users can efficiently extract features on a quarterly, monthly, or even weekly basis to empower time series analysis.
SkyWatch
SkyWatch specializes in gathering a variety of datasets for their customers’ niches from the industry’s leading providers. Their Terrastream platform supports data collected from any platform, including satellites, high-altitude pseudo-satellites (HAPS), and balloons, and any data type, including multispectral, hyperspectral, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), thermal, and global navigation satellite systems (GNSS). Earthcache is a similar platform but offers quicker, more affordable access to imagery from their large archive.
Sentinel Hub
Sentinel Hub is a cloud-based platform for accessing Sentinel data from ESA. The data itself is free and open-source but this commercial platform provides a streamlined way of accessing the data compared to free alternatives. It also provides access to other open-source data like Landsat and MODIS.
Sentinel Hub provides two browsers, Sentinel Playground and EO Browser, for exploring data visually. Both allow you to update band combinations in-browser. They are powered by a configurable OGC API that users can also access with an account.
Sentinel Hub has an open-source analysis toolkit, EO Learn, that is a collection of python packages that allow for the access and analysis of Sentinel and other satellite imagery. It provides tools that enable processes such as cloud masking, feature extraction, and land cover classification.