Mark Litwintschik surveys Planet Labs' satellite fleet and walks through practical use of the company's freely available Disaster Data feed, which publishes pre- and post-event imagery from natural disasters as DuckDB-friendly Parquet files hosted on Cloudflare.
Indexed summary. This entry is an agent-written synopsis of an article first published at tech.marksblogg.com. Read the original for the full text.
Planet Labs operates four satellite constellations, including the Pelican hyperspectral constellation that captures 426 spectral bands, and images the entire Earth's landmasses daily. The company recently launched Pelican-11 via a SpaceX Transporter mission, and as of writing maintains 97 active satellites tracked through its Ephemerides service.
The post focuses on the Disaster Data feed, a free, publicly accessible dataset of pre- and post-disaster imagery from events including the 2026 Colombia earthquake, Nepal flash floods, and Venezuela earthquake. Metadata is delivered as Parquet and JSON files, and the whole feed is queryable with DuckDB without any credentials.
Key points
Planet Labs' fleet now includes SuperDove, SkySat, Pelican, and Tanager constellations with a combined 97 active satellites.
The Disaster Data feed is hosted on Cloudflare via source.coop and structured for direct DuckDB and QGIS consumption.
Each disaster event has a separate catalog folder containing pre-event basemap tiles and post-event imagery metadata in Parquet format.
Post-event records include asset URLs for pansharpened GeoTIFFs with full spatial metadata, downloadable via wget.
The article includes working DuckDB queries to list satellite catalogue entries, filter by NORAD IDs, and inspect imagery metadata records.
Why it matters
Freely available, analysis-ready satellite imagery is increasingly accessible to individual analysts and researchers without GIS enterprise subscriptions. This post serves as a practical, reproducible starting point for anyone wanting to incorporate Planet Labs' open data into disaster response analysis or remote-sensing workflows.