What’s in a name? Rivers, valleys, reservoirs, large solar arrays.
These are just some of the Earthly features used to spell out your name—or whatever message you are inclined to type—with the interactive “Your Name in Landsat” web tool released this summer.
Since its unveiling as part of the virtual 2024 Camp Landsat in August, more than 715,000 visitors have transcribed their names and messages into Landsat letters using the tool. Enthusiasm spread quickly as it captivated folks on social media sites Twitter and Reddit. The tool was also featured in Hackaday and Forbes, where senior contributor and climatologist Marshall Shepherd, pointed out: “As cool as the ‘Your Name in Landsat’ tool is, it highlights a very important mission and contribution to society.”
The Smithsonian Air and Space Museum was likewise inspired to include a “Your Name in Landsat”-based activity in its online Looking Down, What Do You See? monthly family programming.
From ABC to ABE
So how did this captivating Landsat letter tool come to be?
Ally Nussbaum and Ginger Butcher, from the Landsat Outreach Team, had toyed with the idea as far back as 2021. The two had been part of the EO Kids online magazine team and were fans of science writer Adam Voiland’s ABC’s from Space book published by Simon & Schuster, and named a Smithsonian Air and Space Magazine Best Book of 2017.
Adam, a longtime staff writer for NASA’s Earth Observatory (EO), started hunting for planetary letters after a striking letter “V” made by a smoke plume appeared in an image for a wildfire story he was writing in 2012. He invited colleagues and EO readers to join him in finding other letters. By the time all letters had been found, Voiland was a new father and wanted to share the Earthly alphabet as a children’s book.
Fast-forward to 2021, when leading up to the launch of Landsat 9, Ginger conceived of Camp Landsat, a virtual camp of Landsat-based activities and stories. Ginger and Ally together with Ross Walter, an intern at the time, threw around ideas to incorporate the satellite alphabet into an activity, but they wanted every letter to be a Landsat letter—letters found within Landsat images. With time tight, the idea still nebulous (“Landsat ABCs” was an early concept name), other products pending, and the team’s web development ability still nascent, the idea was shelved.
Then on Earth Day 2024, Google—a big user of geospatial and Landsat data—used a satellite time series of letter-like landforms to spell out “Google” for its Google Doodle.
After seeing the doodle, Ally, Ginger, and Ross (by now a full-time creative technologist with the Landsat Outreach team) were reminded to revisit their letter activity.
With the team reinvigorated, more lead time, and better web development skills, “Your Name in Landsat” became a reality for Camp Landsat 2024.
Combing the Planet
One of the most frequently asked questions the team now gets from users is “How did you find all of the letters?” Many guess that AI was used, but that’s not the case. It was regular old elbow grease and Human Intelligence.
Using Adam’s alphabet collection as a starting place, Ross and Ally combed Landsat image repositories for letter-looking features (the USGS Earth Explorer, ESA Sentinel Hub, NASA Worldview, Earth Observatory, Ocean Color). The letters had to be found in Landsat imagery and the team wanted as many letters as they could find, so words with the same letter multiple times could use as few repeat images as possible.
Ross and Ally headed to extreme northern and southern latitudes where fjords and glacier fields offered lots of intersecting linear features. They followed meandering rivers around the world, looking for letter-like curves. They recruited colleagues, friends, and family to search too. This was, by far, the longest part of the process. The hardest letters to find were ones that required a mix of linear and curved shapes together, with “g” being the single most elusive mark.
Once the letters were gathered, Ross worked on the behind-the-scenes code to spit out whatever a user typed-in with Landsat letters, using as many unique letters as available. (Fun fact: this process included some custom coding to restrict curse words.)
With the letters and code in place, the activity needed a name. When sharing the prototype with colleagues, Ross and Ally noticed that project names were what most people typed in first. Knowing that humans are quick to respond to their own names, the activity was dubbed “Your Name in Landsat.”
A-Okay
After looking at so many letters for so long, what were Ross and Ally’s favorites? For Ross, it was an “O” formed by the Manicouagan Reservoir in Canada, a circular-shaped lake formed by an asteroid strike more than 200 million years ago. For Ally, it is an “A” made from a sediment-laden river in Alaska’s Yukon Delta.
That where of the letter locations is another of the most frequently asked questions: “Where can I find more information about the letters in my name?”
After you generate words using the interactive tool, you can hover over any given letter and see the location name and coordinates of the image. If you click on the location name you will be taken to a page with more information about the source image. If you click the coordinates, you’ll be shown the location in Google Maps.
The third most frequently asked question is: “How can I get a higher resolution image of my name?”
On the “Your Name in Landsat” landing page, you can download a beautiful, sharable PNG graphic and you can also find links to high-resolution letter downloads on the tool’s explainer page.
In the future, the team has plans to also add numerals to the collection.
And, in a full circle of teamwork, Earth Observatory is sharing articles about some of the newly found letters, with Adam recently penning A is for Azerbaijan.
Related Listening
+ “Celebrate Earth Science Week with NASA’s Landsat App!” Exploring STEM with SSAI (YouTube)
