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 the PlanetScope L1B Basic Scene 4-band multispectral image products with three visual RGB and one near-infrared band. The 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. It has a scene-based framing, and is not mapped to a cartographic projection. If available, the Surface Reflectance layer which corrects for the effects of the Earth's atmosphere is added to the product.