Planet Labs PBC (NYSE: PL) announced it successfully deployed and executed AI-driven object detection directly onboard its Pelican-4 satellite. The company completed the test on March 25, capturing an image of an airport 500 kilometers over Alice Springs, Australia, and using an onboard NVIDIA Jetson Orin module to detect airplanes within moments of image capture.

The achievement represents one of the first instances of an Earth imaging satellite performing onboard AI inference and analysis beyond basic data capture, according to the company's announcement.

"By running AI at the edge on the NVIDIA Jetson platform, we can help reduce the time between 'seeing' a change on Earth and a customer 'acting' on it, while simultaneously minimizing downlink latency and cost," said Kiruthika Devaraj, VP of Avionics & Spacecraft Technology.

Planet Labs CEO and Co-Founder Will Marshall stated the technology could reduce response time from hours to minutes. "This can be the critical difference-maker for our customers from disaster response to security and beyond," Marshall said.

The company indicated the technology could advance its Pelican and forthcoming Owl satellite constellations into a near-real-time intelligence network. The end-to-end process, including data generation, object detection, and geo-rectification, occurs entirely in orbit. Planet Labs produces GeoTIFF and GeoJSON insights within Docker containers in space.

The development follows Planet Labs' announcement of a strategic initiative with NVIDIA. The company stated the onboard models remain in early stages and will continue to be refined.