Planet Labs Publishes an Open Ephemeris Feed for Its 97 Orbiting Satellites

Planet Labs, the San Francisco Earth-imaging company that photographs the planet’s landmasses daily, maintains a publicly accessible ephemerides service listing the roughly 97 spacecraft it still has in orbit. The feed ships as a standard two-line element (TLE) file, and the post walks through pulling it with a single wget call, extracting NORAD catalog IDs, and joining them against Jonathan McDowell’s GCAT satellite catalog to reconstruct each craft’s orbital and physical details.

The query results lay out the company’s fleet across its overlapping constellations: the larger SkySat and Pelican imaging platforms, the tiny 5.7 kg Flock cubesats that make up the bulk of the count, and the newer Tanager hyperspectral line. Nearly all sit in sun-synchronous low Earth orbit around 500–600 km with inclinations near 97.4°. The most recent addition, Pelican-11, rode SpaceX’s Transporter-17 rideshare on July 7th to join the Tanager constellation.

The practical takeaway for a technical audience is less about spaceflight than about open data plumbing: an operator voluntarily exposing machine-readable orbital data, combined with an open community catalog and a lightweight local analytics stack like DuckDB, is enough to profile an entire commercial constellation from a laptop without any proprietary tooling.