new THEMIS color releases, Images showing color variations. Options

[DDAVIS]

First of a new series:

http://themis.asu.edu/zoom-20060622a

[edstrick]

The sad fact is that the Mars Odyssey cameras have fairly serious design defects that were not caught by enough testing and review, possibly another victim of smaller-faster-better-cheaper. We've had a consistant problem over the years designing cameras that can do more than just good monochrome imagery of low-color-contrast planetary targets.

Voyager, Galilleo and Cassini have done a pretty good job (earlier missions were on the slope of the learning curve), but missions like NEAR (dinky little, noisy, non-square-pixel-CCD), Global Surveyor (wide angle camera's red/blue color data is hard/impossible to align perfectly and the blue channel's noisy), Odyssey (multispectral data's got terrible uncalibratable (more or less) internal reflection defects), Stardust (outgassing on optics, stuck filter wheel), Deep Impact (grossly out-of-focus hirez camera)... just don't perform up there where they should have.

<sigh... rant.. rave..>

[Guest_AlexBlackwell_*]

The sad fact is that the Mars Odyssey cameras have fairly serious design defects that were not caught by enough testing and review, possibly another victim of smaller-faster-better-cheaper. We've had a consistant problem over the years designing cameras that can do more than just good monochrome imagery of low-color-contrast planetary targets.

Voyager, Galilleo and Cassini have done a pretty good job (earlier missions were on the slope of the learning curve), but missions like...Odyssey (multispectral data's got terrible uncalibratable (more or less) internal reflection defects...

I'm not sure if it's been mentioned previously but McConnochie et al. have a paper entitled "Calibration and in-flight performance of the Mars Odyssey Thermal Emission Imaging System visible imaging subsystem (THEMIS VIS)" (3.15 Mb PDF preprint) that, as I understand it, will be published online tomorrow in JGR-Planets.