Planet Labs PBC, a leading provider of daily data and insights about change on Earth, today announced that Pelican-12, an updated second generation (Gen 2) high resolution Pelican™, has arrived at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida ahead of its launch aboard the upcoming Bandwagon-5 rideshare mission with SpaceX.

Pelican-12 leverages key learnings from Pelican-11, which launched in July. Shipping less than three months later with updates to the payload and communication systems, Pelican-12 demonstrates Planet’s end-to-end agile engineering. Like its predecessors, Pelican-12 will allow Planet to test and validate new technologies ahead of integration on future Planet spacecraft.

Planet is working to test commercial data relay services onboard its constellations to minimize latency in its delivery of data to customers. This Pelican satellite is designed to support intersatellite communications using a steerable antenna, and aims to enable two-way communications at higher data rates than the 1 Mbps achieved in an initial demonstration in 2025.

While Planet’s first generation (Gen 1) Pelicans are designed to capture 50 cm class imagery, Gen 2 Pelicans are designed to provide up to 30 cm class imagery – further improving use cases such as agricultural monitoring, critical infrastructure management, and natural disaster response. Pelican-12 is also equipped with the NVIDIA Jetson platform to accelerate on-orbit edge compute, a capability Planet demonstrated by running AI-driven, near real-time object detection onboard Pelican-4. By utilizing its onboard NVIDIA Jetson module, Pelican-12 will help Planet explore new ways to close the latency gap with real-time insights, reduce downlink costs, and continue building towards a future of planetary-scale Earth intelligence.

Pelican-12 will be the fifth Pelican to launch in 2026, showing the rapid expansion of this next-generation, high-resolution constellation. Planet is continuing to scale its Pelican production capacity, with manufacturing at its expanded Berlin facility set to begin this year. Planet plans to launch additional Pelican spacecraft in 2027 to continue to meet growing customer demand for Planet’s high-resolution data products and Satellite Services offerings.

To learn more about Planet’s Pelican constellations and capabilities, visit https://www.planet.com/constellations/pelican/.