Since 1972, NASA and the US Geological Survey have photographed every inch of Earth’s land surface without interruption, the longest continuous space record of our planet ever collected.
For the first time ever, anyone can engage with that archive, not for the sake of science, but simply to have their names spelled in countries on the planet’s surface.
How do you create your name with satellites?
It’s a simple process: Go to NASA’s Your Name in Landsat website, enter any name, and the algorithm finds each character in the database and matches them to a real geological formation, a bend in a river, a line in a desert, or a coastline that resembles a particular shape from space.
Hovering over each mailbox will reveal the exact location of that photo. Type in “Dexerto” and the D comes from Akimiski Island in Canada. By clicking on any of these letters you can see the date of the photo taken by the Landsat satellite.
The Landsat project, a joint effort between NASA and USGS, is responsible for capturing images of Earth’s entire land surface, which it has been doing since 1972. The project has the world’s longest continuous space-based record from Earth’s surface.
While this data serves more than an aesthetic purpose, researchers use this data to track various environmental changes over the years, including deforestation, urbanization, coastline shifts, and agricultural developments.
The reason why such letter matching is possible is because of the vast amount of information in this archive. Tens of thousands of photos of every type of terrain on Earth over half a century allow the system to come up with a suitable match for virtually any letter, regardless of the landscape in which it is set.
This is the second time NASA has managed to attract media attention this year without holding a press conference about its missions. The first was when NASA commemorated Sailor Moon during its Artemis II moon mission.
