In the Brazilian state of Para, authorities every week receive alerts showing them which parts of the Amazon forest have been chopped down, with photographs to back it up.
The pictures are taken every day at 10:30am by US satellites, offering a detailed view of every 3m to 5m on the ground.
An algorithm helps reveal automatically where logging has taken place.
The authorities then send agents to investigate and potentially apprehend the suspects before they do any more damage.
“It used to take six days, sometimes two or three months without images,” said Iara Musse Felix, chief executive officer of SCCON, the company that distributes the alerts. “Now we have daily images.”
The revolution in forest surveillance, and the Earth in general, comes from a constellation of satellites run by a company called Planet.
Founded in San Francisco in 2010 by three former NASA scientists, Planet is a leader in small satellites, which are easier to produce and replace, and tend to have mission lives of three to five years.
The economic model is vastly at odds with the traditional aerospace industry, which builds large, sophisticated satellites that are far more powerful, but take hundreds of millions of US dollars to build.
Planet has placed 298 satellites in orbit since 2013 and half of those were launched last year.
About 150 are active today, 130 of which are nanosatellites.
The rest have fallen back to Earth and burned up on re-entry to the atmosphere.
The so-called “Dove” satellites are made in San Francisco, at a new building presented this week during the Global Climate Action Summit there.
“One technician can build three Dove spacecrafts in a day,” said Chester Gillmore, 33, vice president of manufacturing at Planet. “You need about 10 tools to build one of our satellites.”
There is no “clean room” at the building. Visitors walk in and out freely.
Electronic components are brought in on one side of the room, tested and then assembled.
Doves are a format known as “Cubesat 3u,” including a 30cm cylinder equipped with an internal camera and two solar panels that unfold in orbit.
We “just keep updating it,” said cofounder Robbie Schingler, a former NASA employee. “And that’s what we mastered, the ability to take the latest chips and technologies from other industries like automotive and consumer devices, take the 50 chips that are inside here ... and then make them work in aerospace.”
The company has yet to turn a profit.
Another project financed by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen involves surveilling coral reefs.
Cameras on board the small Planet satellites allow researchers to see whether they are bleaching, dying, or growing.
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