--- id: engines/microsoft-planetary-computer about: depiction: engines/microsoft-planetary-computer.jpg depiction_credit: >- NAIP aerial imagery over a hillshade computed on the fly in the Planetary Computer Explorer, from the Planetary Computer changelog. Microsoft, MIT licence. label: Microsoft Planetary Computer description: >- Microsoft's free catalogue of satellite imagery and environmental data on Azure, searched through a STAC API; its notebook service closed in 2024, so users bring their own computing. tags: - satellite imagery - remote sensing - STAC - land cover - Python - cloud tool: form: hosted data catalogue and APIs (preview) group: Earth observation and AI homepage: 'https://planetarycomputer.microsoft.com/' licence: open-source components MIT; each dataset under its own licence cost: free open: source: partly data: open api: 'yes' participation: open licence: MIT note: >- The APIs, Python package and catalogue site are on GitHub under MIT; the service itself is run by Microsoft under preview terms. domains: - places - ecology - climate relations: - predicate: alternative_to target: engines/google-earth-engine note: >- a free data catalogue that users compute on with their own resources, against a platform that runs the analysis on Google's servers - predicate: answers target: questions/land-use-change provenance: origin: agent sources: - title: Home | Planetary Computer url: 'https://planetarycomputer.microsoft.com/' - title: About the Microsoft Planetary Computer (docs/overview/about.md) url: >- https://github.com/microsoft/PlanetaryComputerDataCatalog/blob/main/docs/overview/about.md - title: Data Catalog | Planetary Computer url: 'https://planetarycomputer.microsoft.com/catalog' - title: 'Planetary Computer STAC API: collections (read 2026-10-26)' url: 'https://planetarycomputer.microsoft.com/api/stac/v1/collections' - title: Using Tokens for Data Access (docs/concepts/sas.md) url: >- https://github.com/microsoft/PlanetaryComputerDataCatalog/blob/main/docs/concepts/sas.md - title: Computing with the Planetary Computer (docs/concepts/computing.md) url: >- https://github.com/microsoft/PlanetaryComputerDataCatalog/blob/main/docs/concepts/computing.md - title: >- Accessing Planetary Computer data in QGIS (docs/overview/qgis-plugin-open-pc.md) url: >- https://github.com/microsoft/PlanetaryComputerDataCatalog/blob/main/docs/overview/qgis-plugin-open-pc.md - title: Terms of Use | Planetary Computer url: 'https://planetarycomputer.microsoft.com/terms' - title: >- Retiring the Hub on June 6th, 2024 (microsoft/PlanetaryComputer discussion #347) url: 'https://github.com/microsoft/PlanetaryComputer/discussions/347' - title: What is Microsoft Planetary Computer Pro? | Microsoft Learn url: >- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/planetary-computer/microsoft-planetary-computer-pro-overview - title: What's new in Microsoft Planetary Computer Pro | Microsoft Learn url: 'https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/planetary-computer/whats-new' - title: microsoft/PlanetaryComputer (README) url: 'https://github.com/microsoft/PlanetaryComputer' - title: Changelog (docs/overview/changelog.md) url: >- https://github.com/microsoft/PlanetaryComputerDataCatalog/blob/main/docs/overview/changelog.md - title: 'microsoft/planetary-computer-apis (GitHub, MIT license)' url: 'https://github.com/microsoft/planetary-computer-apis' - title: 'microsoft/planetary-computer-sdk-for-python (GitHub, MIT license)' url: 'https://github.com/microsoft/planetary-computer-sdk-for-python' created: '2026-10-26' reviewed: '2026-10-26' reviewed_by: >- Claude, from the sources listed; the documentation was read as its source files on GitHub status: draft --- The Microsoft Planetary Computer is a catalogue of environmental data that Microsoft hosts on its Azure cloud and makes available for free, with APIs for finding the data across space and time and a gallery of applications built on it by partners.[^2] Its search API follows the SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) standard, which describes where and when each satellite scene or data file was captured.[^2] The service is still labelled a preview, and its terms say previews come without uptime guarantees, may change or be discontinued without notice, and are not meant for anything mission critical.[^1,8] On 26 October 2026 the API listed 139 collections.[^4] They include the Landsat archive from 1972 to the present, Sentinel-2, Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2, MODIS, the ERA5 reanalysis, the Copernicus 30 m and 90 m elevation models, ESA WorldCover land cover, US NAIP aerial photography, Microsoft's building footprints and GBIF species records.[^3,4] Each collection carries its own licence: ESA WorldCover is CC BY 4.0 and the building footprints are ODbL, for example.[^4] The STAC API can be used anonymously.[^2,5] The files themselves sit in Azure Blob Storage, and reading them needs a short-lived token (a SAS token, a signed key appended to the file's address) that anyone can request without an account; the `planetary-computer` Python package fetches and refreshes these tokens automatically.[^5] Requests from registered users, or from inside Azure's West Europe region where most of the data is stored, get more generous rate limits and longer-lived tokens.[^5,6] QGIS 4.0 and later can browse the catalogue directly through its built-in STAC browser.[^7] The APIs, the Python package and the catalogue website are open source on GitHub under the MIT licence.[^2,12,14,15] Microsoft launched a hosted Jupyter notebook service, the Planetary Computer Hub, in April 2021 and retired it on 6 June 2024, citing company-wide security requirements the Hub could not meet; the data and APIs were unaffected.[^9] In its place Microsoft suggested Microsoft Fabric, Azure Machine Learning, GitHub Codespaces, or deploying one's own hub from its published guide.[^9] For production work Microsoft recommends the user's own computing, placed in West Europe next to the data.[^6] Microsoft Planetary Computer Pro is a separate Azure service for an organisation's own private geospatial data, deployed as a GeoCatalog resource in an Azure subscription; it reached general availability in June 2026.[^10,11] For someone modelling a place, the Planetary Computer supplies satellite imagery, land cover and elevation for a watershed or county without downloading whole archives.[^2,3] A script searches the STAC API for the area and dates, then reads only the files it needs.[^5] Unlike [Google Earth Engine](/engines/google-earth-engine/), it does not run the analysis itself, so the computing is the modeller's own.[^6,9]