Category Archives: Education

Join in the fun ~ TeachOSM Back-to-School Night ~ September 21

When: September 21st, 2021 8:00 PM through  9:00 PM (Eastern)

Attention educators and mappers! Join TeachOSM Tuesday, 21 September for our first ever ‘back-to-school’ night. We’re offering an informal open house to introduce our programming. This hour-long event will feature brief demos from teachers and mappers to enable you to:

  • Find out more about how you can put OSM in your school
  • Learn how to take advantage of our Map-Alongs and other educational programming
  • Find out how you can get support open mapping education in your community

Sign up now to reserve your space!

Greetings from Camp Landsat: Cities and Suburbs

Greetings from Camp Landsat!

Postcards From Camp: Cities & Suburbs
Are you exploring any cities this summer? Rain or shine, urban planners use Landsat to take stock of city growth and its environmental impact. The front of this postcard features a natural-color Landsat 8 image of Ocean Flower Island in Hainan, China acquired May 6, 2020.

This week’s camp theme is Cities and Suburbs and focuses on the growth of cities and urban areas as seen over time through Landsat images. Urban growth has impacts on the surrounding environment. Visit Camp Landsat to learn more and experience a time-laspse video of urban growth in Qatar, a storymap about urbanization of vacation towns, and learn about urban heat islands in Minnesota. This week’s camp crafts include Color by Number Image Classification and creating a bird house with a “green roof.” Thank you to our friends at NASA for making this fun summer camp possible!

Are you looking forward to the Landsat 9 Launch?

Rocket Launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base, Lompoc, California

Photo Credit: U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Ian Dudley
Photo Credit: U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Ian Dudley

Landsat 9 is scheduled to be launched on September 16, 2021. This will mark almost 50 years of earth observation by US satellites. In preparation for this historic launch, we will be sharing several interactive documents about the history of the Landsat mission as well as the information about the Landsat 9 mission.

Today we would like to share with you, A History of the Landsat Program, developed by Ellie McGinty at UtahView. It’s an interactive Google Earth Tour, which documents major moments in earth observation history through a combination of maps, text, and curated images starting with the founding of the United States Geological Survey in 1879 through the birth of NASA in 1958 to the conception of Landsat in 1970 and all the way to the present day launching of Landsat 9.

Remembering the 2020 Midwest Derecho

A year ago today a derecho, a series of thunderstorms with hurricane-like winds and heavy rains, struck Iowa with very little warning. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) put together a multi-media story map to tell the tale of this eventful day. Hundreds of thousands of trees were lost or damaged. Homes and buildings were destroyed. Many people lost power for days or even weeks.

Have you visited the NASA’s Earth Observatory? It is a NASA website that helps make satellite imagery relevant to the general public and it is a great place to find images for presentations or use in the classroom. In August 2020, the Earth Observatory featured a comparison of satellite images from July 2020 and August 2020 to show the extent of the derecho damage on Iowa cropland.

Camp Landsat Counts Down to the Landsat 9 Launch

Each week NASA’s Landsat Science team will explore a unique aspect of Landsat earth science (see themes below). Weekly features include Landsat related crafts and games, revisiting each sequential Landsat mission as well a weekly postcard from camp. Stop by each week of camp to explore a new theme.

#ConnectedByEarth – Earth Day 2021!

This year NASA’s Earth Day theme is #ConnectedByEarth. Visit the NASA Earth Day Poster website to watch a short video about the inspiration for the poster and discover the gems hidden within the poster. Download your copy of the poster to learn more about bees and our natural world.

Happy Earth Week 2021!

Earth Day Poster by Brazilian artist – Septo

Here are some ways to celebrate:

A. Get outside – enjoy the beauty of the earth and mark your observations.
Consider joining a citizen science project such as Nature’s Notebook or GLOBE observer Tree Challenge.



B. Explore our beautiful Earth with Ellie Leydsman McGinty’s (UtahView) Earth as Art 4 tour.

C. Learn some new GIS skills with resources from AmericaView members: Google Earth Engine (GeorgiaView), QGIS (WestVirginiaView), or ArcGIS Pro (VirginiaView).

D. Put together an Earth image Puzzle.

Celebrating the “Mother of Landsat” – Virginia T. Norwood

“I have seen further by standing on the shoulders of giants.” ~ Sir Isaac Newton

This week is the virtual American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS) conference. At today’s conference, the ASPRS Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to Virginia T. Norwood.

Virginia Norwood is known as the “Mother of Landsat.” When interviewed by Laura Rocchio for a NASA Landsat Science article, Ms. Norwood was asked if she is comfortable with this title and she replied, “Yes. I like it, and it’s apt. I created it. I birthed it; and I fought for it.” In recognition of her contributions to satellite communications and optics for over 40 years, including the design, building, promotion and operation of the first multspectral scanner (MSS) on-board Landsat-1, Ms. Norwood was awarded the 2021 ASPRS Lifetime Achievement Award.

To learn more about Virginia’s story: https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/article/virginia-t-norwood-mother-landsat

Congratulations, Virginia! Thank you for all your contribution to Landsat and Science!