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.
They conclude that one possible problem could be the impacting of cosmic particles (commonly called cosmic rays) onto the sensitive electronics within Spirit.
Cosmic particles are energetic quantum particles that come from outer space and impact the surfaces of Earth, Mars, and other bodies in the solar system. Most of cosmic rays are made up of protons, along with minor percentages of helium nuclei (alpha particles) and electrons (beta minus particles).
As of Wednesday (January 28], project manager John Callas reported, "Right now, Spirit is under normal sequence control, reporting good health and responsive to commands from the ground."
Then on Thursday [January 29], the JPL article was updated. It stated, “Diagnostic activities performed by Spirit on Thursday, Jan. 29 narrowed the range of factors that may have contributed to its unexpected behavior earlier in the week. No clear explanation has been established yet. Spirit is healthy and responding to commands. It recorded and returned images of nearby scientific targets.”
It added, “The rover team plans further diagnostics on Friday of Spirit's inertial measurement unit -- a combined gyroscope-and-accelerometer device that measures rover movements and attitude. Spirit may resume driving over the weekend.”
It is very fortunate that the two little rovers have lasted about twenty times longer than expected. Much more information have been collected than was originally planned for the mission.
Even though such problems are occurring much more frequently than earlier in the mission, these two tiny robotic explorers are still continuing to supply us with valuable information on Mars, which further helps us to understand more about our own planet Earth.
David Bass
| ComOps, a leading Australian provider of business software products and services, has won a competitive tender to deploy its Salvus safety, r…
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