The Bellingcat Investigation Team is an award-winning group of volunteers and full-time investigators who are at the core of Bellingcat's investigations.

Our team purchased a subscription to Planet Labs, a private company whose satellite can capture 50 cm resolution images of any place on the earth within a few days of receiving a mission request. Just a few years ago, non-profit and independent researchers who played a key role in Bellingcat's work were basically unable to obtain satellite imagery of this quality.

We intend to regularly collect suggestions on where this task should be directed, and then publish the resulting images for everyone to access and analyze. To enable this exciting new resource, we will soon launch a Twitter poll that will compete our four favorite proposals against each other; the winning proposal will be assigned and the image will be posted.

If you want to suggest the location of a satellite mission, please be as specific as possible and include the following details:

For example, the al-Jalaa building in Gaza City (destroyed in an Israeli airstrike in May 2021) could be constructed like this:

We hope you send these suggestions as a reply to our Twitter thread. However, you can also email them to Satellite (at) bellingcat (dot) com at any time.

In the spirit of our commitment to cover public interest topics and enrich the tools and resources available to open source researchers, we have expanded this opportunity. Therefore, there are almost no restrictions on where tasks can be assigned.

This is not unlimited resources, we must strictly control the number of tasks we undertake. (Unfortunately) it is impossible to satisfy every request or suggestion.

Nonetheless, we emphasize that we are willing to accept any country’s mission assignment proposal, including military bases and other locations that are sensitive to national security.

Some potential ideas that have been crowdsourced from Twitter include:

We look forward to receiving your suggestions and welcome any questions or comments on this new resource.

Your donation to Bellingcat is a direct contribution to our research. With your support, we will continue to publish groundbreaking investigations and expose illegal activities around the world.

In addition to the content we have published, we will also introduce readers to the activities our employees and contributors participate in, such as noteworthy interviews and training seminars.