[lonevoice]

Awesome!

BTW, a question from the non-scientific peanut gallery. I've seen a lot of posts bemoaning the fact that NASA's pictures aren't in color, but I haven't seen an explanation for why they're not. Anyone?

[alnitak]

Because it's a mono CCD camera, with various filters that can be used in front of it. If you just want to have a look-see mono is faster to shoot and takes less bandwidth to transmit to earth. I presume the science guys would rather have more B&W pictures than 3 times fewer colour ones (A colour pic requires you to take 3 separate exposures). Besides we know the colour - it's red :-)

That said, I hope Opportunity takes some colour photos of that rock outcrop.

There is no such thing as a colour CCD sensor. They are all basically just electronic photon counters, even the "colour" ones in eg. consumer digital cameras actually have an RGB colour filter matrix laid over the top of the pixels.

[Phil V.]

I've seen a lot of posts bemoaning the fact that NASA's pictures aren't in color, but I haven't seen an explanation for why they're not. Anyone?

. . . here's one . . .

The color is produced from the raw pics taken through different filters. This process apparently yields more scientific information.

[gitmo]

It's also a bandwidth issue. They can get more quantity and quality without transmitting color as well.