Imagine this: a world where ordering satellite imagery is as easy as ordering dinner through an app. As anyone who’s familiar with the industry knows, the reality is quite different. The realm of geospatial projects faces a variety of challenges, and tasking satellites is one of the biggest.
- "I don't know the price."
- "I don't know if this operation is feasible."
- "It’s too complicated to place an order."
- "I need more control over my operation."
Sound familiar? The good news is that you’re not alone, and we’re working towards solving these issues. UP42 enables organizations to easily order, access, and analyze geospatial data. Our geospatial platform is at the forefront of this vision, and we've released a bunch of cool features this year that offer a faster and more intuitive ordering experience. In this post, you’ll see how UP42’s tasking offering will help you overcome the biggest satellite imagery-related obstacles.
Tasking satellites with UP42
The UP42 tasking solution brings together the world’s top satellite imagery providers, giving you quick and easy access to Earth observation imagery through a single touchpoint.
Our platform is built with the end user in mind. It doesn’t matter if you’re a data engineer working with APIs all day, or a project manager who wants to conduct some quick discovery before kickstarting a new project. We provide you with all the flexibility that you need through our intuitive console, API, and Python SDK.
Use case
Now, let’s get right into it. Why would you use UP42 for tasking instead of going to individual providers? Here’s a sample use case to see how tasking typically works with UP42.
Let’s say you handle ordering and managing remote sensing/earth observation imagery for a geospatial consulting firm. The firm has won a tender to monitor power lines in the Seattle urban area to create a maintenance planning schedule for the rest of the year. The project requires images of power lines in multiple corridors, spread across different parts of the city.
Currently, a project like this involves reaching out to multiple satellite providers and getting bogged down with week or month-long negotiations over price, image quality, acquisition window, and so on. Moreover, each provider will have different ordering processes and compliance checks that you need to complete before you even get to see if their offering matches your requirements.
This is where our tasking solution can make a difference. After signing up for our platform in seconds, users can choose the Professional plan to start ordering commercial data right away.
1. Easily upload multiple AOIs for complex projects
When you deal with big projects containing multiple areas, you often need imagery covering complex AOIs of varying shapes and sizes. Getting through this step often needs endless email exchanges with different providers, which can take weeks. With UP42, you upload your complex AOIs instantly, without any hassle. When you upload an AOI geometry file with multiple features, the individual geometries will be automatically detected, split, and marked as separate items.
2. Leverage the power of cross-sensor tasking
We offer a curated selection of the world’s top satellite providers on our platform. This ensures that our users have flexibility when it comes to pricing, data type, and revisit frequency. Once you’ve chosen your providers, you can customize your order details with our tasking ordering form, which gives you full control over your order parameters. The process is really easy, and consistent across all the data collections we offer.
3. Reduce the complexity around feasibility and pricing
The conversations over accepting the right feasibility study and pricing is another part that can significantly slow down your whole operation. Operators need time to come back to you with different feasibility options. You get notified when your feasibility plans are ready - if they suit your requirements, you can accept the plan in-app and proceed to pay with UP42 credits. We ensure that the journey from placing an order to accessing the images is as smooth and intuitive as possible.
4. Access your ordered imagery from UP42 storage
When your images are ready, they’re delivered to your storage folder. Even before you download and use this imagery, you can view scene footprints, allowing you to easily monitor the covered area. The API and Python SDK snippets let you quickly integrate the downloaded assets into your data pipelines.
The data in storage is automatically transformed into a cloud-native asset model, which makes it even easier to use and share. The cloud-native asset model (or CNAM) means that you can easily search for and work with geospatial data, without having to understand different formats or naming conventions.
Conclusion
To reiterate, UP42 tasking takes away a lot of the complexity around placing orders for geospatial projects. Our next goal is to look at earlier parts of the user workflow where our solution can make a difference. Soon, we’ll introduce a revamped tasking console that makes it easier for users to conduct project discovery, without the huge up front cost commitment. Plus, we continue to add a host of new partners, further enriching our platform and giving our customers more flexibility and options.
Try out UP42 here. If you have feedback or questions, please reach out to me at [email protected].
