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.