There are a number of qualities and characteristics to consider about satellite data and types of satellite orders. These include the Spatial Resolution, the Temporal Resolution, the Available Bands, and whether you make a Tasking or Archive order.

The temporal resolution of a given dataset is quite simply how often it is collected, or in other words, how fine-grained it is in terms of time. High-revisit systems such as Planetscope can be said to be of high temporal resolution, whereas low-revisit systems are of low temporal resolution.

Main article: Available Outputs

The bands available on a given satellite help to determine what kind of analysis can be performed on it. Please see the above article for more information on what bands SkyWatch provides.

A note, ALL archive imagery are delivered as All Optical Band output types. This means you will have access to all the bands acquired by the satellite sensor, including RGB. Only tasking orders you have the option to select True Colour, RGB+NiR, or All Optical Bands.

Satellite data available through Explorer (with the exception of SAR data) comes in three main spatial resolution categories:

This is data from Sentinel 2, and is provided at 10 m (pansharpened) resolution for the majority of outputs. This data is free to access, although it has a long revisit interval (the amount of time between subsequent coverage of an area), and is not suitable for many applications. It is most useful for large area monitoring, and to watch trends over time, has been around for a long time.

This is data from satellites such as SPOT and Planetscope, and is generally around 1.5-3 m in resolution. This data is well-suited to agricultural applications, and is a popular option for commercial optical data.

High resolution data includes data from satellites, like TripleSat and SkySat, with resolutions ranging from 0.5 - 0.8 m. This data is very well suited to infrastructure monitoring, urban monitoring, use cases that require high quality optical outputs and where further analytics require the higher resolution.

Our other high resolution sensors available include:

- Pleiades | 0.5 m/pixel

- Beijing-3 | 0.5 m/pixel

- SkySat | 0.5 m/pixel

- TripleSat | 0.8 m/pixel

Very high resolution data includes our Pleiades-Neo satellites, with resolutions from 0.15 m to 0.3 m. When you are wanting to view details on a surface, such as vehicles, roads, small buildings, and trees, this data product will be our best recommendation. Pleiades-Neo also comes with 6 spectral bands (when All Optical Bands output is selected).

For an overview of pricing see Data Pricing on our website.