Since 1972, NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey have been taking photographs of every inch of Earth’s land surface without interruption, the longest continuous space-based record of our planet ever taken.
For the first time, any person can join that collection not for the sake of science but to get their name engraved on land on the Earth’s surface.
How to make your name from satellite?
It’s a simple process: Go to NASA’s Your Name in Landsat website, 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 the desert, or a shoreline that looks like a certain shape from space.
When you hover over each letter box, the exact location of that photo is revealed. Type “dexerto”, and the D comes from Akimiski Island, Canada. By clicking on any of these letters you will be able to see the date of the photo taken by the Landsat satellite.
The Landsat project, a joint NASA/USGS effort, is responsible for photographing the entire Earth’s land surface, which it has been doing since 1972. The project holds the world’s longest unbroken space-based record of the Earth’s surface.
These records serve more than just an aesthetic purpose, however, as researchers use these records to track various environmental changes over the years, including deforestation, urbanization, coastline changes, and agricultural development.
The reason such letter matching is possible is the sheer amount of information in this collection. Thousands of photographs taken over half a century from every type of terrain on Earth enable the system to come up with a viable match for almost every letter, no matter what landscape it is set in.
This is the second time that NASA has managed to attract media attention without holding a press conference regarding its missions this year. The first was when NASA commemorated Sailor Moon during its Artemis II moon mission.
