Microsoft Planetary Computer

Purpose

This page will outline Microsoft Planetary Computer as a cloud-hosted geospatial data ecosystem built around open catalogs, STAC metadata, and scalable analysis.

Outline

• What the Planetary Computer provides as a data catalog and analysis environment.
• Strengths for cloud-native datasets, STAC discovery, and analysis-ready access patterns.
• Limitations around platform availability, authentication needs, quotas, and dataset-specific constraints.
• How its catalog relates to common Earth observation, climate, land cover, and environmental datasets.
• Workflow relevance for prototyping, reproducible discovery, and moving compute near data.
• Engineering implications for signed URLs, chunked formats, lazy loading, and distributed processing.
• Access patterns through the STAC API, cloud asset URLs, hosted examples, and Python tooling.

Later Examples

• Finding imagery through the Planetary Computer STAC API.
• Loading cloud-hosted raster assets into an analysis workflow.
• Comparing Planetary Computer access with Earth Engine-hosted datasets.