Operational Band-to-Band Correction and Attitude Refinement of Pelican-2: Dual-Panchromatic Attitude Restitution and Selective Bundle Adjustment with Preliminary Application to Earthquake Displacement and DEM Generation

Abstract. The Pelican satellite constellation, first launched by Planet Labs in 2025, continues the high-resolution imaging capability established by the SkySat program. The change to pushbroom sensors in Pelican presents new geometric challenges: satellite attitude variations and platform instabilities during acquisitions can produce band misregistration and geolocation errors that degrade downstream products. This paper presents an operational workflow developed for Pelican imagery, validated on Pelican-2, a technology demonstration satellite. The approach exploits the dual-panchromatic focal plane configuration to independently measure satellite wobble to greater accuracy than on onboard attitude sensors, combined with selective bundle adjustment and B-spline spatial correction to achieve sub-pixel band alignment without dense ground control points. Validation on 963 Pelican-2 scenes demonstrates sub-pixel band-to-band registration accuracy (RMSE < 0.12 px) and 4 m CE90 geolocation accuracy. Applications illustrate the potential for operational geoscience workflows: earthquake surface displacement mapping of the March 2025 Myanmar M7.7 rupture detects 4.0 m co-seismic offsets on the Sagaing Fault with minimal post-processing, and digital surface model generation from an opportunistic multi view acquisition yields preliminary elevation products free of jitter artifacts, demonstrating operational feasibility for constellation-scale processing.