Sounds like you understand what drives me pretty well, Fox. I'm a Mars nut, on a quest for understanding and, let's face it, a vicarious sense of being there through the images. I'm not too worked up about how NASA does the images because it then gives me a chance to learn about image processing, and that journey too is its own reward. It's a twofer.

I think you misinterpreted Doug's comment "What in hells name would the point be in 'fixing' the colour of mars?". By "fixing" I think he meant "fudging", which I took to mean "what's in it for NASA?". That's why I responded "no point", because of course there really is no payoff for them. I really dothink it's just a bureaucratic snafu, and maybe if some light gets shed on it, they might try harder with their public releases (I'm sure the scientists do their own images or have their own internal source, and don't labor under the orange-sepia handicap; at least I hope so, otherwise why bother to send those superb cameras to Mars?).

Over and above the science, and the prestige of getting a Mars mission right for the first time in a while, there's a few thousand of us Mars Geeks who rely on these rovers to show us what we long to see with our own two eyes in realtime, but will never get the chance. We - who hope our children, or their classmates, or their children will walk the Martian surface - want to see what little we can in the same way they some day may see it.

No response, I just thought that that paragraph was worth repeating ;-)