Since 1972, NASA and the US Geological Survey have been photographing every inch of Earth’s land surface without interruption, the longest continuous space-based record of our planet ever assembled.
For the very first time ever, anyone can engage with that archive not because of science but simply to have their name spelt out in lands on Earth’s surface.
How to create your name with satellites?
It’s a simple process: head to the Your Name in Landsat website by NASA, enter any name, and the algorithm will find each character in the database and match them to a real-life geological formation, a curve in a river, a line in a desert, or a shoreline that resembles a certain shape from space.
When you hover over each letter box, the exact location of that photo is revealed. Type in “Dexerto”, and the D comes from Akimiski Island in Canada. By clicking on any of those letters, you’ll be able to see the date of the picture taken by the Landsat satellite.
The Landsat project, a joint NASA/USGS effort, is responsible for capturing imagery of the entire Earth’s land surface, which it has been doing since 1972. The project has the world’s longest unbroken space-based record of the Earth’s surface.
While these records serve more than an aesthetic purpose, as researchers utilise these records to track various environmental changes, including deforestation, urbanisation, coastline shifts, and agriculture developments, through the years.
The reason why such letter matching is possible is because of the massive quantity of information in this archive. Tens of thousands of photographs from every type of terrain on earth over half a century allow for the system to be able to come up with a viable match for almost every letter, regardless of which landscape it’s set in.
This is the second time that NASA has managed to attract media attention this year without holding a press conference regarding its missions. The first was when NASA commemorated Sailor Moon during its Artemis II moon mission.
