The long measurement time complicates the surface operation logistics of the lander.
Minor disturbances may have a large impact on the airport surface operations due to the overly tight schedules, which results in frequent gate conflict occurrences during airport's daily operations.
In recent years an increasing interest in the Moon surface operations has been experienced.
"We don't think we are going to have problems driving there," Jennifer Trosper, the manager for the Spirit's surface operations here at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said at a news conference.
The nature of surface operations is such that it requires the input, coordination and cooperation of various actors.
Matt Wallace, an engineer planning the rover's surface operations, said that an immediate goal was to establish direct communications between Spirit and Earth with the craft's more powerful antennas, which are capable of high-speed radio transmissions of data and pictures.
If large areas of the Moon are developed into solar farms then energy could potentially be beamed back to Earth, or used on the Moon for surface operations or spacecraft charging.
If necessary, the mathematical morphological algorithm can be used for further refined processing by removing the independent voxels using open surface operations and filling the small holes using closed surface operations to connect the neighboring voxels.
The HGA task should have been completed on Sol 1 - the first full day of Martian surface operations - but the team is having to deal with a pointing error on the antenna.
