The PlanetScope satellite constellation, called ‘Flock’, consists of multiple launches of groups of individual Dove satellites into a 400 km orbit. Some of them were launched from the ISS. Therefore, on-orbit capacity is constantly improving in capability or quantity. Each Dove satellite is a CubeSat with a size of 10 x 10 x 34 cm. The complete PlanetScope constellation of approximately 130 satellites is able to image the entire land surface of the Earth every day, equating to a daily collection capacity of 200 million km².

In 2014 the first Dove satellites started operationally acquiring images from the earth’s surface. The optical sensors mounted on the individual Dove satellites operate in the visual and near-infrared parts of the electromagnetic spectrum with a spatial resolution between 3 and 5 meters. A third generation of PlanetScope sensors (known as SuperDove or PSB.SD) is currently in orbit and is producing limited quantities of imagery with 5 spectral bands (BGRNIR + Red Edge). These satellites have the potential to produce imagery with 8 separate spectral bands. The PlanetScope data of this collection has been purchased by the German Space Agency with funds from the Ministry of Economy and is available for Germany-based researchers for scientific use. The data collection is maintained by the German Satellite Data Archive (D-SDA) of DLR’s Earth Observation Center and can be accessed via the EOWEB Geoportal.

This collection comprises PlanetScope L1B Basic Scene 3-band natural color RGB products. The PlanetScope Basic Scene product is a Scaled Top of Atmosphere Radiance (at sensor) and sensor corrected product, providing imagery as seen from the spacecraft without correction for any geometric distortions inherent in the imaging process. It has a scene-based framing, and is not mapped to a cartographic projection.