When I have some spare time to kill, I like to peruse new pages and recent edits for instances of vandalism. I try to be as careful as I can to avoid reverting legitimate edits, but nobody is perfect. If you're here because you feel that I have incorrectly or unfairly targeted one of your edits as vandalism, please leave me a message on my talk page. Wikipedia being what it is, you obviously have the ability to restore your edits, but if I get things wrong, I appreciate hearing about it so that I can (hopefully) avoid making the same mistake in the future.
I'm in the midst of beefing up the content in the Landsat Program pages. I've worked in this program for many years now, and I'm looking to share some of the knowledge that I've acquired to improve this series of Wikipedia articles. It's been slow going thus far; I don't have a ton of spare time to dedicate to this. I've started off by writing some templates for standard navigation and Earth satellite info boxes. (Hopefully, I've kept the Earth satellite infobox generic enough so that it can potentially be used outside of the Landsat program realm of things.) I've also started adding some technical details, such as additional information on the Scan Line Corrector (SLC) failure on Landsat 7. Tracking down references for a lot of this is going to be a challenge, particularly for the older satellites. Most of the documentation for them exists only in paper form and in many cases has been simply lost (think of the closing scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark).
I was playing around in Google Earth one day, looking around in the high Canadian Arctic. I happened to find an odd-looking installation along the shores of the Arctic Ocean near the Yukon / Alaska border. Upon further inspection, I found other such installations at similar latitudes throughout northern Canada and Alaska. Curious as to what they might be, I started browsing through Wikipedia articles on Alaska, the Yukon, the Northwest Territories, etc. and eventually stumbled upon the article for the Distant Early Warning Line. Cold War-era stories and relics fascinate me, and the thought of all of these dozens of remote radar installations in the frozen Arctic North was intriguing. This external link in particular contains a slew of great information on this short-lived but vital component of the West's air defenses in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Awarded for this user's work in substantially improving the Adequacy.org article in the midst of its nomination for deletion. JGardner 10:38, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
