Posted to the Space.com bbs:

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exoscientist
Member

"Pretty pictures."
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glynebwy said:
"Also the more important fact is why waste millions of dollars of money producing a pretty but scientifically useless fancy picture when real science is being done using the instruments.
Pretty pictures are NOT worthwhile science."

No doubt you would have preferred the Pathfinder lander images as well to have been in black and white. And the Galileo images. And the Voyager images. And the Hubble images.

It is a strawman whether you call the color images Mars Odyssey is capable of "true color". Fact is it has the same capability of creating color images as does Galileo by combining images from 3 different color filters:

Bringing Images from Space to Earth: Taking the Picture.
"When the Galileo camera looks at its "target" - a planet or moon, for instance - light from the target object passes through the lens and then through a color filter before falling on an electronic chip called a charge-coupled device, or CCD.
...
"Additional pictures of the same scene are taken through other color filters - red, green, blue, etc. After all the pictures are transmitted to Earth, a color image of the scene is constructed from three of these black-and-white images taken through different filters."
http://deepspace.jpl.nasa.gov/dsn/tutor/takepic.html

Bob Clark
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exoscientist
Member

Did you check your THEMIS image of the day?
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rhw007 said:
"Maybe because space.com got awful tired too of more n more black n white images from a COLOR camera?"

Amen brother. Anyone else get the feeling they've already seen images such as these from THEMIS from the MGS camera?

'Course that would all change with posting of color images ...

Bob Clark
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