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About the Microsoft Planetary Computer

The Microsoft Planetary Computer is a platform that lets users leverage the power of the cloud to accelerate environmental sustainability and Earth science.

The Planetary Computer consists of three major components:

  • The Data Catalog, which includes petabytes of data about Earth systems, hosted on Azure and made available to users for free.

  • APIs that allow users to search for the data they need across space and time.

  • Applications, built by our network of partners, that put the Planetary Computer platform to work for environmental sustainability.

Built on Open

The Planetary Computer uses open source tools and supports open standards. In fact, the foundation of the Planetary Computer is the incredible ecosystem of tools being developed in the open by our partners and the much broader open source community. For example, our API builds on the work done by the STAC community to streamline and standardize the cataloging and discovery of geospatial data.

Many of the Planetary Computer components are also open-source. These provide guidance on how to tie together open-source libraries on Azure for geospatial and environmental data analysis. The various Planetary Computer GitHub repositories are listed below:

GitHub repository

Purpose

Microsoft/planetary-computer-apis

Deploys the STAC and data APIs

Microsoft/PlanetaryComputerExamples

Contains notebooks with examples for each dataset, quickstarts, and tutorials for using the Planetary Computer

Microsoft/PlanetaryComputerDataCatalog

Contains homepage, data catalog, docs, and visualizations for the Planetary Computer

Microsoft/PlanetaryComputer

Hosts issues and discussions that users can use to provide feedback and get help in using the Planetary Computer

Microsoft/planetary-computer-sdk-for-python

A Python library for interacting with the Planetary Computer

About the Preview

The Planetary Computer data and APIs are publicly accessible and can be used without an account, including:

Tip

To report issues, ask questions, or engage in community discussions please visit our GitHub repository.

Next steps

Beyond the Planetary Computer

The Planetary Computer is just one component of Microsoft’s commitment to environmental sustainability.

Cite the Planetary Computer

If the Planetary Computer is useful for your work, please cite it using this record on Zendo. Here’s a BibTeX entry for your reference:

@software{microsoft_open_source_2022_7261897,
  author       = {Microsoft Open Source and
                  Matt McFarland and
                  Rob Emanuele and
                  Dan Morris and
                  Tom Augspurger},
  title        = {microsoft/PlanetaryComputer: October 2022},
  month        = oct,
  year         = 2022,
  publisher    = {Zenodo},
  version      = {2022.10.28},
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.7261897},
  url          = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7261897}
}