Programming error lead to loss of Mars Global Surveyor

Programming errors are something that are inevitable when any computing system is involved. In a normal application development, these are known as bugs that get fixed. But errors in any kind of programming can happen anytime and any place, including at locations millions of kilometers from the earth. Earlier, there was the time when a craft sent to the moon had crashed due to incorrect conversion between different units of measurement.
The Mars Global Surveyor was an accomplished success for NASA. It was originally supposed to have a life of 2 years, but given how it was working, this life period was extended 4 times, and it gave a good new perspective of Mars, including the latest presentation of a couple of months back that water still flowed on the Martian surface from small springs.
So what went wrong ? In June last year, a command that oriented the spacecraft was sent to the wrong address. This caused the solar power panels to get wrongly positioned. A couple of months later, when the spacecraft detected the positioning error, it tried to go into safe mode, which unfortunately caused one of the batteries to get exposed to direct sunlight, in turn causing over-heating. Sensors shut down the charging system, and this eventually drained the batteries, and communications were lost with earth. Refer this article.