Ed,

I've played around with color Viking Lander images. It's hard to know how to balance the colors, and the "true" color of Mars has been controversial since the day of the first landing. I have two color images here. Not quite panoramas, but wide swaths. The first one (21I091) shows frost, and I balanced the color to make the frost white, and then superimposed the low-res color over a high-res monochrome image. Whether the colors are right because I balanced against frost is still up in the air--a reddish tinge might actually be proper if there's dust in the atmosphere. However, the exposed dirt and rocks do roughly match the supposedly-more-accurate Pathfinder colors, so maybe I did get it right.

I don't know if anybody's tried to do a color full panorama from Viking Lander images. Even a mono panorama is a bear, what with stitching images and correcting for the tilt of the lander. Trying to do color means matching images taken at roughly the same time of day and season, and it doesn't seem as though the Viking mission plan provided for a consistent full panorama like the Pathfinder "Presidential" and the rest. Any color panorama would be a Frankenstein patchwork of mismatched images from different hours and seasons.

--Robert