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Hello,

I’m thinking about a potential application for a group of students.  I’m wondering if there is any information about typical revisit times for the skysat and other high res products?  Is there someone I could speak to about this?

Thanks,

Alex

Hey Alex! So with SkySat, and indeed any traditional ‘tasked’ satellite there isn’t really a ‘typical’ revisit time like there is with Planetscope, as most every picture taken with SkySat was directly ordered by someone. So if you’re willing to pay then you can get revisit times of 5+ times per day using the SkySat constellation. You can buy archive SkySat data, and this can be up to daily in areas that other people are highly interested in, but in less popular areas of the world (like the middle of a desert) it can be less than once a year. So it really depends - today many people are interested in the Ukraine so there’s lots of revisits there, but it really comes down to who is tasking the satellites and what they’re interested in.

Planetscope is a really unique constellation in that it’s higher resolution than the public missions (Sentinel, Landsat) but operates in a similar ‘monitoring’ configuration, always capturing everywhere. So it’s quite possible to give typical revisit times of a monitoring constellation (every 14 days for Landsat, every 5 for Sentinel, every 1-2 days for PlanetScope). But with tasking it’s more about the potential revisits that the constellation is capable, but there’s no ‘typical’ unless you are the one tasking it.


Thanks @cholmes - didn’t realize skysat is all about tasking.  Sounds like there’s no monitoring product out there (public *or* private) with a higher spatial resolution than planetscope; is that correct?


That’s correct. I think there’s one or two companies who have aspirations to do a higher resolution monitoring product. But it’s a tough one, since as you increase resolution you usually decrease coverage, so you’d likely need a lot more than the 200 satellites Planet has up (and they’d need to either be bigger or fly lower). I believe EU / Copernicus is planning 5 meter for it’s successor to Sentinel 2. EarthDaily is probably the next commercial company doing a monitoring mission, but they’re aiming for increased spectral resolution, with 21 bands, aiming for 5 meter - see their press release.

 


That’s great - thanks @cholmes.


@cholmes isn’t the revisit time for Landsat 16 days? unless you’re considering the Landsat 8-9 phased combination in which case it should be 8 days. Very useful information on the upcoming missions in this thread, thanks for sharing!


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