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Planet Labs operates a fleet of Earth-imaging satellites that provide daily geospatial data for agriculture, defense, and environmental monitoring.
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Google's first orbital TPU satellite can run its chips for only about 15 minutes before its radiators catch up, Ars Technica reports. Power is the easy part in orbit, so radiator area decides how many chips each satellite can carry.
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Google's orbital compute paper needs Starship to lift 370,000 tons to reach $200-a-kilogram launches, about 180 flights a year for a decade. Its first TPU in orbit will run in 15-minute bursts while Google tests whether a satellite can supply a kilowatt of steady power and keep the chip cool.
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Google is flying four TPUs, roughly one server's worth of compute on a kilowatt of solar power, in Project Suncatcher's first orbital test. The satellite can show whether the chips survive heat and radiation in orbit, a smaller question than whether computing there is cheaper.
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Eos's Landslide Blog compared Planet Labs images from 12 and 25 August and found little change on the Langtang Lirung slope that collapsed on 26 August. The few changes it found are hard to tell from background activity, a problem for optical warning systems that would rely on such imagery.
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Google launches its first Project Suncatcher satellite on October 1 with four TPUs on about 1kW of solar, roughly one data center server's worth of compute. It can show whether the chips stay cool in orbit, but the laser links any capacity case needs wait for a two-satellite test in 2027.
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Google's MVP satellite takes four TPUs and about 1 kW of solar power into orbit to test whether AI chips survive radiation and shed their own heat. Its results will show whether rebooting away bit flips and cooling through a radiator can carry into the constellations Google has already sketched.
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An August glacier collapse killed more than 1,000 people on the Tibet-Nepal border. The author of a phys.org piece, who works with British Antarctic Survey glaciologists, writes that winter snowfall across the range is still measured too sparsely to constrain the models.
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Google flies one server's worth of TPUs on 1 kilowatt of solar power on Oct. 1, its first hardware test for orbital AI data centers. The flight tests chip survival and cooling while SpaceX's and Blue Origin's far larger constellations still wait on FCC review.
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Planet Labs says roughly $4 billion of satellite-services deals sit in its pipeline, with about a quarter of that expected to close in the coming quarters and dozens of partnership talks mostly in Europe.
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Delegations from about 120 countries came to Paris to talk business, with SpaceX and Blue Origin absent. What Europe wants to own is the imaging and connectivity it currently buys from American firms.
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Three operational FireSat satellites have been in orbit since July, so this money buys build rate rather than proof. Terms, valuation and the equity-debt split remain undisclosed.
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Cornell researchers identified the species of 1.8 million NYC trees at 82% accuracy, including the two-thirds of canopy nobody had surveyed. Planting targets now have to name names.
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