The mission to create a searchable database of Earth's surface | Will Marshall

Planet has successfully completed its first mission by deploying a fleet of over 200 satellites to image the entire Earth's landmass every single day. This deep stack of historical data allows users to monitor global changes in real-time, aiding agricultural yields, disaster response, and human rights monitoring in regions like Syria and Myanmar. The newly launched Planet Stories platform democratizes this access, enabling journalists and the public to create time-lapses and compare daily imagery to hold global actors accountable. The next phase of development, Mission Two, integrates artificial intelligence to automatically index every object on the planet—from ships and planes to individual trees. This "Queryable Earth" initiative aims to transform satellite imagery into a searchable database, allowing users to track illegal fishing or deforestation through direct queries, effectively indexing the physical world in the same way Google indexed the internet.