The Government has offered Australia's three mobile operators, and vividwireless, renewal of their existing spectrum allocated on 15 year licences in the late 90s and early 2000s at set prices, while the Government expects to rake in $3 billion.
Observations from the ESA's Cluster satellites favour one of two competing theories about 'space tsunamis' - the substorms that disrupt the northern lights and interfere with GPS reception.
Since Cluster comprises four spacecraft orbiting in formation, it gives scientists much more information about substorms caused by high-energy particles carried on the solar wind interacting with the Earth's magnetic field than would be available from a single satellite.
There are two theories that attempt to describe substorms: the 'current disruption' and 'near Earth neutral line' models. An international team of scientists has found that the new Cluster measurements support the current disruption model.
"The features we observed are consistent with the current disruption model. However, it is unclear how general these findings are. More events will be examined in the future," said the study's lead author Tony Lui, a scientist of the Applied Physics Laboratory at the John Hopkins University.
Cluster was planned to run from 2001 to 2005, but the mission has been extended to 2009. The original Cluster satellites were lost when their Ariane-5 booster failed a few minutes after launch from Kourou, French Guiana. Their replacements were launched on a Soyuz-Fregat launcher from Baikonur, Kazakhstan.
The satellites have a very eccentric orbit between 19,000 and 119,000 kilometres from Earth to take them in and out of the planet's magnetosphere.
Cluster is not the only mission investigating this phenomenon. NASA's THEMIS (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms) is dedicated to studying substorms.
David Bass
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