This is standard practise with deep-space probes. The magnificent colour photos we see from them are composites taken through red, green, and blue filters and then recombined into what we humans perceive as "colour". As always, it's the basics that count, and those can mostly be defined in 256 shades of grey. Shoot three of those, through different coloured filters and miraculously one gets "colour".Kirbstone wrote:As B&B remarked, pity Cassini was equipped with only a b&w camera.
The defining limit in deep-space operations is how much of the data can you actually -- successfully -- downlink to Earth given the time available to DSN and the bit-rate one can do from a distance. The actual bit-rate coming back from some of these spacecraft actually makes dial-up modem speeds from the late 1980s look pretty good sometimes. Our little robot ambassadors are a very long way from home, and have limited power available; so life for them is pretty basic.