Planet Labs PBC (NYSE:PL) announced on Friday that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has extended its Blanket Purchase Agreement with the San Francisco-based company. The agreement, part of the Commercial SmallSat Data Acquisition (CSDA) Program, includes multiple orders totaling $18.5 million in funding through 2024.
Following the announcement, shares of Planet Labs were up on Friday.
The CSDA program enables approved civilian federally funded researchers and federal civilian agency employees to access Planet's 50 petabyte archive of PlanetScope imagery for scientific use and Earth science applications. Since its inception in 2018, thousands of researchers have utilized Planet satellite data for studies on various subjects including climate change, biodiversity loss, and disaster response.
Will Marshall, co-founder and CEO at Planet, expressed pride in the collaboration with NASA and the research community. He highlighted how Planet's data has been used to understand various dimensions of Earth's system, from tidal marshes in Georgia to glacier calving faces in Greenland and the rich rainforest biodiversity of Borneo.
The partnership with NASA has been active for over five years and supports scientific researchers across more than 32 different U.S. Federal Government agencies. In the last year alone, 41 presentations at the Fall American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting, the world's largest annual gathering of geoscientists, leveraged Planet's data through the CSDA program.
Victoria Hill of Old Dominion's Department of Ocean, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences attested to the program's transformative impact on their capacity to map coastal environments. She cited how they were able to generate monthly maps of submerged aquatic vegetation in the Chesapeake Bay, revealing large seasonal fluctuations that could not be captured by current airplane-based mapping.
Planet Labs PBC, founded in 2010 by three NASA scientists, is a leading provider of global, daily satellite imagery and geospatial solutions. The company operates the largest Earth observation fleet of imaging satellites and serves over 900 customers worldwide, including leading agriculture, forestry, intelligence, education, and finance companies and government agencies.
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