I posted looking to get my own peer review. Instead of "rubbishing" me, how about giving the question some serious thought?

Have you done your own analysis of the NASA press release images?

If you did, and got the same result, how would you explain it? If you got a different result, please present it.

If your result was the same, can you come up with a method other than colorization to produce it? I.e., how would one take multispectral images and reduce the range of hues to the extremely narrow band we see in NASA press release images?

How would you explain the remarkable consistency between the two MER sites, and the Pathfinder site, and (as asserted by NASA) the Viking sites? Is it remotely reasonable to assert that an entire planet is a single color? If so, then why bother to equip the MER rovers with such excellent panchromatic cameras if they expected to find just a single hue? The filters are intended for geological studies to identify minerals by spectra, because (at least on Earth) rock reflects light at many distinct frequencies. Does rock on Mars have such vastly different properties? Odd, because they've announced identification of basalt and haemetite, among others; is basalt that different on Mars?

It sounds as though you still haven't read the entire thread. Nowhere did I claim that NASA has anybody under "control". In fact I said just the opposite, that there's no conspiracy and that this probably doesn't even involve scientists or image processing engineers. Rather, it's likely just nonscientific people in the PIO wielding commercial graphic software according to a long-established recipe. Bureaucratic inertia.

Further, I said nothing about "Justin"'s work; Dr. Maki to the rest of us. Do you know him personally? I speculated that some NASA official had read way too much into Maki's work (abstract), extrapolating from his results at the Pathfinder site to the breathtaking generalization that the entire planet is that particular hue, and setting that mistake into stone in a bureaucratic dictum. That wouldn't be Maki's fault.

I suggest you do some SCIENCE and look at the raw pathfinder imagery

Doug, it's comments like that that identify you as a newbie. I've paid my dues many times over. Even before Pathfinder I worked with Viking images. For example, calibration of Viking Lander colors to frost. That's why I have reason to consider NASA's assertion that the color of the Pathfinder site is identical to both Viking sites to be ridiculous. That doesn't pass the most basic logic check: An entire planet a single hue without the slightest variation? Gimme a break.

This is, what?, the third time I've tried to correct your basic misunderstanding of what I said. Will you please read the material and my comments on this thread carefully, and do a little homework, before launching a rant?