Satellogic, a vertically integrated geospatial company delivering high-resolution Earth Observation (EO) at unprecedented scale and economics, announced Merlin, its latest constellation addition designed to enable daily remapping of the entire planet at one-meter resolution and expand the capabilities of its Aleph Observer persistent monitoring product. The first Merlin satellite is scheduled to launch in October 2026, with full operational capability expected in the first half of 2027. Merlin combines daily global coverage with one-meter spatial resolution, a capability that Satellogic believes is not available in Earth observation systems today. This combination is expected to enable entirely new intelligence applications by allowing organizations to monitor activity continuously and cost-effectively on a planetary scale.

“Merlin is designed to solve a fundamental limitation in Earth observation,” said Emiliano Kargieman, CEO and Co-Founder of Satellogic. “Until now, organizations had to choose between global coverage at low resolution or high-resolution monitoring of a limited number of sites. Merlin removes that trade-off and enables persistent monitoring at planetary scale.” Merlin is designed to significantly expand the capabilities of Aleph Observer, Satellogic’s persistent monitoring product. Today, Aleph Observer enables organizations to monitor hundreds to thousands of locations across their areas of interest. With Merlin, that capability extends to an unlimited number of monitored sites.

Customers will be able to monitor millions of locations simultaneously. Some examples include military bases, ports, airports, border crossings, and critical infrastructure. This expands monitoring from hundreds or thousands of sites today to persistent awareness across entire countries and regions. By continuously global remapping the planet, Merlin is also designed to reduce one of the historical constraints in Earth observation: limited access to imaging capacity. Instead of tasking satellites or competing for coverage, users gain continuous access to a global monitoring baseline.

“Aleph Observer was designed to enable persistent monitoring,” Kargieman added. “Merlin expands that capability from thousands of monitored sites to millions, allowing customers to move from periodic observation to continuous awareness.” Merlin is designed for defense and intelligence missions that demand global scale, reliability, and speed. Reliability ensures consistent daily coverage across the planet. Speed enables rapid identification of operational activity and immediate response through real-time alerts. The constellation combines several capabilities to support this operating model:

• Daily global remapping at one-meter resolution
• Ten spectral bands aligned with Sentinel-2
• AI-first onboard processing of every pixel for classification, object detection and identification
• Real-time communications and intelligence alerting

When meaningful activity is detected, inter-satellite communications enable rapid follow-up observations from Satellogic’s broader fleet, allowing higher-resolution collection of events as they unfold. Merlin is built to meet demanding defense requirements while enabling robust monitoring capabilities for civil government and commercial applications, including environmental monitoring, agriculture and forestry management, infrastructure oversight, and energy network monitoring. Many satellite systems capable of frequent global coverage operate at several-meter resolution, which is effective for mapping and broad change detection, but often lacks the detail required to identify human activity. Other high-resolution systems can capture detailed imagery, but are limited to a small number of sites per day, and users have to compete for scarce capacity to access them.

Merlin is designed to close this gap by combining daily global coverage with one-meter resolution, enabling analysts to identify meaningful activity on the ground, including the presence or absence of monitored objects, aircraft movement, vehicle activity, and infrastructure changes across large operational environments. The result is a shift from periodic observation to continuous awareness. Instead of purchasing imagery scene by scene, customers can subscribe to persistent monitoring coverage across networks of assets such as airbases, ports, infrastructure systems, or conflict regions. Through Aleph Observer, organizations define the locations or regions they want to monitor while Satellogic’s constellation continuously delivers updated observations. “With Merlin empowering Aleph Observer, Earth observation moves beyond collecting satellite images,” said Kargieman. “It becomes continuous intelligence. We are building a persistent global intelligence infrastructure.”

Click here to learn more about the Satellite Cameras Featured on SATNow