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.
Incorrect failsafe programming of the onboard computers of the Mars Global Surveyor orbiter led to its ultimate demise after 10 years of successful operation, according to a NASA report.
Mission control lost contact on November 2, 2006,
10 years after its lauch in 1996. A preliminary report by an internal
review board found that computer error eventually led to battery
failure causing the Mars Surveyor to go dead.
"The loss of the spacecraft was the result of a series of events linked
to a computer error made five months before the likely battery
failure," said board chairperson Dolly Perkins, deputy
director-technical of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
On Nov 2, after the spacecraft was ordered to perform a routine
adjustment of its solar panels, the spacecraft reported a series of
alarms, but indicated that it had stabilized. That was its final
transmission. Subsequently, the spacecraft reoriented to an angle that
exposed one of two batteries carried on the spacecraft to direct
sunlight. This caused the battery to overheat and ultimately led to the
depletion of both batteries. Incorrect antenna pointing prevented the
orbiter from telling controllers its status, and its programmed safety
response did not include making sure the spacecraft orientation was
thermally safe.
The review board concluded that procedures were insufficient to catch
the errors that occurred. The board is finalizing recommendations to
apply to other missions, such as conducting more thorough reviews of
all non-routine changes to stored data before they are uploaded and to
evaluate spacecraft contingency modes for risks of overheating.
"We are making an end-to-end review of all our missions to be sure that
we apply the lessons learned from Mars Global Surveyor to all our
ongoing missions," said Fuk Li, Mars Exploration Program manager at
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
Despite the eventual computer led shutdown of the Mars orbiter, it
operated for 10 years, four times the planned length of the mission and
relayed valuable information such as evidence that water still flows on
the red planet.
David Bass
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