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

21st C

[BenBenBen]

So when are we going to have the technology to send _colour_ cameras to Mars?

I've seen them in some very expensive shops, so I'd have thought NASA would be able to shrink one down to the size of a football or so.