The Real Reason why Spirit Only Sees Red

use_compress writes To produce a color photograph, the rover's panoramic camera takes three black-and-white images of a scene, once with a red filter, once with a green filter and once with a blue filter. Each is then tinted with the color of the filter, and the three are combined into a color image. In assembling the Spirit photographs, however, the scientists used an image taken with an infrared filter, not the red filter (NYTimes, Free Registration Required). Some blue pigments like the cobalt in the rover color chip also emit this longer-wavelength light, which is not visible to the human eye."

Comments

Was in New Scientist a week or so ago

[Space cowboy]

The reason being that the science gets better results using th e IR filter than if the red filter were used... At the moment, despite great public interest, the science is more important... that IS what it's there for....

Simon

Re:Was in New Scientist a week or so ago

[SnowZero]

And it was on NASA's site almost two weeks ago:
Revealing Mars' True Colors: Part One
Revealing Mars' True Colors: Part Two
Nothing to see here, take off the tinfoil hat.

Versatility

[Detritus]

Instead of being limited to some fixed approximations of red, green, and blue, they can use a larger set of filters that are tailored for various science objectives.

The human eye's color vision is a poor scientific instrument. It can be easily fooled.

Re:Why don't they release the RGB too?

[robsimmon]

I would guess (based on my experience with other NASA data archives) that the full scientific data are not being released until they've been calibrated, at which point they'll probably end up in the Planetary Data System It's also possible that the Principle Investigators (who are affiliated with Cornell, not NASA) have exclusive use of the data for some period of time. Scientists are often very reluctant to share data until they're happy with it. Whether this is good public policy (since the data was all paid for by the US public) or good science is open to debate, but it's certainly not a conspiracy.

In the case of the more dramatic images, Public Affairs is almost certainly embargoing the images so the press release will (in theory) have more impact. If you really want the data you can always try a Freedom of Information Act request.