Vince wrote:
Any idea on a timetable for "color" images from Odyssey/Themis?

Alex writes:
Not really, though I would surmise that it will occur no sooner that when the THEMIS team feels that the data are reliable enough to release to the science community, which is different from satisfying the clamor of the "public" at large. At any rate, from what I gather the simple fact of the matter is that while THEMIS five-band images have been continuously acquired during the mapping phase to date, none have been released due to the THEMIS team's struggle to remove instrument artifacts (e.g., flat-fielding to take out shading effects, even in a non-quantitative fashion), problems with coregistering the bands, etc. This effort has turned out to be more difficult than previous imaging systems because of THEMIS's unique system design.

That said, one might note that there is a definite compromise between the number of bands acquired and the areal coverage desired. For example, the instrument can map N times more area with one band than with N bands. So, depending on the prioritization, e.g., more areal coverage versus more coverage at multiple bandpasses, one should not be surprised that the THEMIS team is, per the pre-launch mission plan, utilizing more bandwidth to acquire IR data, which has been deemed more important and thus given the lion's share of collection and downlink during the primary mapping mission. Indeed, the high spatial resolution THEMIS IR data are the novel feature of the instrument suite, not the VIS "true color" RGV imagery, especially given that Mars has already been mapped in RGV by Viking.

Alex R. Blackwell
University of Hawaii