It's really nice to able to quietly reflect on some of these issues with you.

I am not real sure about the Rayleigh effect, and blue skies. What seems of most use to me is white light images (D65), as it resembles the best possible lab bench conditions. The reason that this kind of adjustment is useful is in picking out meteorites on the surface of Mars - meteorite accumulation over time is the way you get Mars surface ages, and probably the best of doing this would be with an automated algorithm.

The big one of course is not with simple imaging, but rather with cutting the orbital data sets and altitude sets over to Microsoft flight simulator, and then describing a dirigible. You'd have to adjust the orbital data sets by subtracting out dust loading, and then standard shift the result to white light, but my oh my the results - floating over Mars at relatively low altitudes at will, examining features from any direction. While I don't care much for games, VRs are another matter, and with a little soft music on the stereo in the background this one would be quite slick... ah well, someday...

Over-wintering the MERs, eh? Great! My guess is that they'll try to find some kind of cubby holes, sun and no wind, and spend all the power on heat - but next spring they'll be good to go again. I really like value for my space dollar.

I wonder if there is any kind of experiment which could be done on the Viking calibration targets which remain on the Viking lander test models here on Earth - perhaps this has been examined to death, but one never knows...

By the way, Martian "eyes" might be sensitive to IR on the surface, for the heat, while subsurface they might be magnetic... :P)

all the best,
ep