why are all the images B&W? surely 2 billion dollars buys a colour camera these days
more on topic, it's an amazing achievement.
The main issue is that colour is a relative thing. Colour photos are actually a combination of 3 black and white channels combined. RGB - Red Green and Blue. Stacking these at various intensities produces colour images. On the last rovers they had a colour 'swatch' next to the camera so that they could reproduce the colours as the camera sees them on mars. If you take the raw images from any camera, they tend to be all different because they all 'translate' the RGB channels slightly differently so rather than relying on a processor on the rover to produce the images they do it more accurately here on earth.
Using the black and white images taken from mars they are able to translate the image into as true a colour reproduction as possible by using this as a reference image.
They know what it looks like here, so they have a fair idea what it should look like on mars. What they have is the RGB channels, 40% grey and 60% grey. The 6th one apparently is fluorescent that glows red when a UV source is shined on it.
It also has a focus calibration on it and the coin is there as a size comparison reference.
The initial wide angle shots are taken using the engineering cameras that are used for hazard avoidance, the really cool photos are expected in about a week apparently when the big mast thing is deployed.
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