Satellite data provider Planet announced Tuesday that it plans to launch a new fleet of orbiting eyes so powerful they can distinguish road markings on the ground.

Planet, which already operates 200 Earth observation satellites from space, wants to make the new function available in 2023.

The new satellites, called Pelican, could be used for mapping services, such as Google maps; in environmental tasks, such as spotting illegal forest clearers or observing crops; and in defense to monitor troop movements and airport activity.

"The data is faster, it's higher resolution, it's lower latency, it's more on demand," Robbie Schingler, a former NASA engineer who co-founded Planet in 2010, told AFP. "It's a whole new satellite."

The announcement, made at the company's annual conference, underlines the dynamism of the booming nanosatellite market.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope successfully arrived in French Guiana Tuesday, after a 16-day journey at sea. The 1,500-mile voyage took Webb from California through the Panama Canal to Port de Pariacabo on the Kourou River in French Guiana, on the northeastern coast of South America.

The world's largest and most complex space science observatory will now be driven to its launch site, Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, where it will begin two months of operational preparations before its launch on an Ariane 5 rocket, scheduled for Dec. 18.

Once operational, Webb will reveal insights about all phases of cosmic history—back to just after the big bang—and will help search for signs of potential habitability among the thousands of exoplanets scientists have discovered in recent years.

Spending long periods in space not only leads to muscle atrophy and reductions in bone density, it also seems to have lasting effects on the brain. Neuroimaging studies (amongst others from this LMU team of researchers) has hinted at this over the last three years. However, little is known if the observed brain-structural alterations are harmless or clinically relevant. LMU physicians Professor Peter zu Eulenburg and Professor Alexander Choukér together with renowned researchers from the University of Gothenburg (Sweden) and Russian colleagues have assessed the structural integrity of the human brain via blood-based markers in astronauts after return from a long-duration mission. The researchers could demonstrate with their pilot study published in JAMA Neurology that there are strong indications for brain injury and accelerated aging following a long-duration mission.