Like the academic service, Planetary Computer Pro builds on the open SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) specification, which allows you to use a standard set of queries across different data sets to simplify query development. It provides tools for visualizing data and supports access controls using Entra ID and Azure RBAC. It’s for your own data; it doesn’t provide third-party data sets for now, though direct links to the Planetary Computer service are on the road map, and the examples in Microsoft Learn show how to migrate data between the services.
Building a geospatial computing environment on top of Azure makes a lot of sense. Underneath Azure, tools like Cosmos DB and Fabric provide the necessary at-scale data platform, and support for Python and the Azure AI Foundry allow you to build analytical applications and machine learning tools that can mix geospatial and other data—especially time-series data from Internet of Things hardware and other sensors.
Planetary Computer Pro provides the necessary storage, management, and visualization tools to support your own geospatial data in 2D and 3D, with support for the necessary query tools. A built-in Explorer can help show your data on a map, letting you layer different data sets and find insights that may have been missed by conventional queries.
