Landsat Earth Day tool

NASA’s Earth Day name-spelling tool turned half a century of satellite imagery into a social-media hit, letting users build words from real landscapes seen from orbit. (science.nasa.gov) The interactive is called “Your Name in Landsat.” Users type letters A through Z, and the site returns a shareable image built from satellite scenes chosen to resemble each character. (science.nasa.gov) NASA says the images come from the Landsat record, a joint NASA and U.S. Geological Survey program that has tracked Earth’s land surface for more than 50 years. The project page says users can also export the finished graphic. (science.nasa.gov; svs.gsfc.nasa.gov) The alphabet is made from actual places, not drawn letters. NASA’s gallery lists examples including Lake Mjøsa in Norway for “A,” Kruger National Park in South Africa for “F,” and the Holuhraun lava field in Iceland for “I.” (science.nasa.gov) NASA first packaged the feature for Earth Day on April 22, 2025, alongside that year’s Earth Day poster. A NASA Scientific Visualization Studio page for the project was published on May 27, 2025. (science.nasa.gov; svs.gsfc.nasa.gov) The tool works as a gentle introduction to remote sensing, the practice of measuring Earth from a distance with instruments on satellites. Landsat scenes that look playful in the alphabet are the same kind of images scientists use to track farms, fires, water, glaciers, and city growth. (science.nasa.gov; science.nasa.gov; science.nasa.gov) That long archive is one reason Landsat remains a core public data set. NASA says the program’s free imagery contributed an estimated $25.6 billion to the U.S. economy in 2023. (science.nasa.gov; usgs.gov) NASA also built the project for broad public use. The outreach page labels it for ages 10 and up, estimates it takes less than five minutes, and credits Ross Walter, Allison Nussbaum, and Ginger Butcher from the Landsat Project Science Support Team. (science.nasa.gov) For Earth Day, the pitch was simple: type a name, get a picture, and share it. The deeper point is that the same satellite archive spelling out first names is also one of the government’s longest-running records of how Earth’s surface changes over time. (science.nasa.gov; science.nasa.gov)