Talk about getting blood from rocks!
Hey Robert
Excellent work. I enjoyed your comments, analysis, and especially the blink compensator. I too sometimes imagine that the splotches might be organic, but dark rocks or other natural heat sinks could account for these cycles too, as you note.
We need higher resolution images. I wish we could bombard Mars with probes and encircle the Red Planet with all manner of imaging and instrumentation. If we really made the effort, we could answer the question of life on Mars within a decade, imo, without sending men there.
sp