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Old 05-August-2009, 07:11 PM
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All? For all time? That's sounds like nonsense.

On many probes, the way they get "color" is by imaging the scene though individual color filters (sort of like blue, red, green, but a little more than that) onto a CCD camera, which is in effect, a "black and white" camera (a pixel is either lit up or not). They then combine those three images to obtain a "color" image. The individual raw images are in effect black and white (actually black and blue, black and green, etc).

Here is NASA's explanation of the PanCam from the Mars Rovers.
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