It's easy to get me talking about one of my favorite subjects. I've been thinking about this "true color of Mars" issue for a long time!

I wouldn't think that color would be an important factor in counting craters--mono images would do just as well for spotting the shape. Color would come into play more in revealing something about the material excavated by the impact.

Many people have used the altitude and image sets to produce landscapes of Mars, and there've been a couple of interactive "flyable" programs. But I don't think anybody's converted the data to a format MS FlightSim could use, and that would be hot. That'd help Mars go mainstream by making it accessible to the general public...'course, I think that at this point our agendas diverge. But no doubt a Mars version of FlightSim would be totally awesome no matter what a person wants from it. Yeah, drifting over the landscape in a simulated dirigible...sweet!

Seems like a lot of people have struggled with the Viking targets over the years, trying to find some way to wring reliable calibration out of them; and nobody's fully succeeded as far as I know. They got covered with dust and discolored by UV, and in some images they're shaded by parts of the Lander. I think we may have to write them off as a first attempt, from which we've learned how to do calibration targets better. Pathfinder's produced better results, and the MER targets seem better still. The real hope is to take today's calibration and retrofit it to the old Viking images, making some assumptions about "standard" or "average" colors, maybe on recognizable rock types.

As I understand the winter plans, they're going to park the rovers on sunny north-facing slopes to maximize radiation on the solar panels. Should be enough energy to maintain the systems in a dormant mode, and, I hope, to wake them up every now and then for a few pictures. There's something really engaging about the thought of a couple of rovers spending a long time on the surface, maybe because of the sense of permanance and commitment. Kind of like the difference between "flags and footprints" and serious long-term exploration.

I'm in the middle of moving starting today, so the conversation's probably going to languish. That's OK, this is a perennial subject, and it'll be back.