<You and Nick Hoffman say no, based on spectral analysis.

To quote Ronald Reagan, "there you go again." You are really adept at misstating what I post. Nowhere did I state that White Rock was not "white." In the MGS MOC imagery, as well as the MO THEMIS VIS imagery, White Rock does, to anyone who is not color blind, appear "whitish." What I did say, however, was report the results obtained by the MGS TES team stating "that White Rock is not anomalously bright relative to other Martian bright regions, reducing the significance of its albedo...[its] thermal infrared spectrum...shows no obvious features of carbonates or sulfates and is, in fact, spectrally flat."

Based on this, you insinuated, not too subtly, that I and other "scholars" simply bow to authority. Frankly, I do not even think that you are familiar with the views of "authority" since you do not even really address their (Ruff et al.) points.

Your point, I guess, is that we are not to believe our lying eyes when it comes to Mars, that we should believe instruments which support your conclusion.

Well, ignoring your colorful insults, my point is that one should be scientifically precise in what he or she is stating. If that is beyond your abilities, then OK. Also, your "lying eyes" analogy is irrelevant. Neither your eyes nor mine have been in orbit around Mars. None of the Mars imagers can mimic the color response of the human eye, though processing can give a reasonable facsimile. What is "white" to you may appear to be off-white to me, or even greyish. Different strokes, I guess. The real point is that White Rock, according the spectral data, is not "anamously bright," as salt deposits or playas would be. In fact, calculations I've seen show, were that the case, then White Rock would be "dazzling" bright. Even so, none of the ridiculously stretched images I've seen on kooky websites approach this albedo.

In closing, you seem to have some personal issues you need to deal with before you can engage in a dispassionate discussion. And, as per my last post, notwithstanding your casting of red herrings, I'm still waiting for you to actually address "...spectral emissivity, separation of atmospheric components in the TES spectra, endmember sets, spectral response of the human eye vis a vis multispectral and hyperspectral imagers, etc., as well as the data processing methods involved in each..."

Thought I forgot about that, didn't you? ;-)