High-Res Photo Shows Sand-Capped Butte Rising from Mars Plain of Polygons

And at the same time over here we move fast and break things, we have regime changes. People chasing the latest fads or quarterly gains. Min/maxing.

I find some solace in that somewhere we are still able to make these long running missions. I hope we develop such long term vision also for the more near problems of our world. (Both in time and space.)

Mastcam uses a Bayer RGB matrix, very similar to a consumer digital camera. Effectively, each "pixel" of the matrix has an R, G, or B color filter in front of it. I don't know the specific wavelength response of each filter, but it's likely to be very close to a high-end consumer camera.

This is different from (e.g.,) Hubble images, which (a) are captured through non-RGB filters, and (b) use long exposures far beyond what a human eye would see.

Here is another rendering of the same raw data: https://www.flickr.com/photos/nev-t/55357706514/

It is no less or more non-adjusted, all digital colors are interpretations of some sort. Of course you can also download the raws from NASA/JPL and process them yourself. But then you have to make the decisions on how to render the colors.

areo.info has some information about their own image processing pipeline for M2020/Perseverance images (the successor mission of MSL/Curiosity), with good links: https://areo.info/mars20/

Lot of that information should be applicable to Curiosity too. But on the other hand I personally think many of their renderings look pretty weird so take the info with a grain of salt?

* Data exceeding 10GB/month will be rate limited to Voyager 2 speed.