Planet Labs, one of the world’s leading commercial satellite imaging companies, said Friday it is placing a hold on releasing imagery of some parts of the Middle East as a regional war enters its second week.
The company, which brands itself as Planet, operates a fleet of several hundred Earth-imaging satellites designed to record views of every landmass on Earth at least once per day. Its customers include think tanks, NGOs, academic institutions, news media, and commercial users in the agriculture, forestry, and energy industries, among others.
Planet also holds lucrative contracts selling overhead imagery to the US military and US government intelligence agencies.
“In response to the conflict in the Middle East, Planet is implementing temporary restrictions on data access within specific areas of the affected region,” Planet said in a statement emailed to Ars. “Effective immediately, all new imagery collected over the Gulf States, Iraq, Kuwait, and adjacent conflict zones will be subject to a mandatory 96-hour delay before it is made available in our archive.”
Imagery over Iran will remain available as soon as it is acquired, the company said. “This change applies to all users except authorized government users who maintain immediate access for mission-critical operations.”
Overhead intelligence
In the last few days, Planet’s satellite imagery showed the aftermath of Iranian missile and drone strikes on US and allied bases in the region, including damage to the US Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain and to a $1 billion US-built early warning radar in Qatar used for tracking incoming projectiles. Planet said it wants to prevent “adversarial actors” from using its data for “Battle Damage Assessment (BDA)” purposes. In other words, the company doesn’t want to help Iran’s military know where it succeeded and where it failed.
The decision is “rooted in our commitment to ensuring the safety of US, allied, and NATO-partner personnel and civilians on the ground,” Planet said. “As the conflict evolves, the area impacted may change.”
The risk to US personnel in the region is real. Six Army reservists were killed during an Iranian attack on Kuwait on March 1.
Planet’s restriction also means the public may have to wait a little longer for independent confirmation of the damage Iran has inflicted on US and allied infrastructure in the region. In addition to revealing damage to a fixed early warning radar installation in Qatar, commercial satellites have detected strikes on US-made transportable radar units in Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and possibly Saudi Arabia, according to CNN. The mobile radars support THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) missile interceptors.
Planet was founded in 2010 by former NASA scientists, who emphasized the company’s mission to support environmental monitoring and climate research. “We are imaging the planet to save the planet,” said Will Marshall, Planet’s cofounder, in 2014. Since then, Planet has won successive contracts from the Pentagon, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), making the defense and security sector a major portion of the company’s portfolio. The NRO has its own fleet of orbiting spy platforms capable of seeing more detail than commercial satellites.
In a statement, Planet said it “remains dedicated to its mission of providing global transparency through satellite imagery. However, given the dynamic and unpredictable nature of the current conflict, we have a responsibility to mitigate the risk that our data could be misused and inadvertently contribute to a greater loss of life.”
Planet did not say whether the US government requested it pause the release of Middle East imagery. In any event, there are other sources of commercial overhead satellite imagery that do not share the same ties with the Pentagon.
Airbus flies a fleet of high-resolution optical remote sensing satellites named Pléiades. These European satellites detected damage to mobile early-warning radars in Jordan and the UAE. A growing number of Chinese imaging satellites also fly in low-Earth orbit, and one Chinese firm released imagery last month showing the US military buildup in the Middle East.
Iran has launched a handful of its own surveillance satellites, but none have the sophistication and sharp vision of US, European, or Chinese imaging spacecraft. Iran also lacks any capability for airborne surveillance over the Gulf States.
But one of Iran’s major arms suppliers, Russia, is now providing the country’s military with targeting information to attack American forces in the Middle East, The Washington Post reported Friday. The newspaper cited three officials familiar with intelligence on the matter.
Another leading US satellite remote sensing company, Vantor, has also published high-resolution images showing the results of military strikes in the region. Most of Vantor’s publicly available images show damage from US and Israeli strikes inside Iran, but one of the company’s satellites captured a view of the smoldering aftermath of an Iranian attack on a Saudi oil refinery earlier this week.
A spokesperson for Vantor, formerly known as Maxar, said the company has a “longstanding policy of not sharing our high-resolution satellite imagery of US or coalition military forces or deployments with the media. This is not a change for us. We continually to regularly provide updates of other activity across the region.”
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