Mars isn't actually red. Well, it is, but it also isn't. If you spent all day looking at images of Mars surface sent back by the Perseverance rover, you’d realize pretty quickly that the planet is actually a messy palette of butterscotch, golden brown, and even weird greenish-greys. The "Red Planet" branding is mostly just a result of the iron oxide—rust, basically—kicking up into the atmosphere.
It’s dusty.
Most people expect high-definition, cinematic panoramas that look like a Ridley Scott film. The reality is much more grit and much less glamour. When you look at the raw files coming off the Deep Space Network, they’re often black and white, grainy, and full of digital artifacts. We have to stitch them together. We have to calibrate the color. It's a massive technical headache that scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) deal with every single day just so we can see what’s actually happening 140 million miles away.
How we actually get images of Mars surface to Earth
Sending a photo from Mars isn't like uploading a selfie to Instagram. It’s a slow, grueling process of data packets. First, the rover—let’s take Curiosity or Perseverance—snaps a bunch of frames using its Mastcam-Z or Navcams. These aren't just one photo. They’re often "tiles" of a much larger mosaic.
The rover doesn't just beam these straight to Earth. That would take forever because the rover’s direct-to-earth antenna is relatively weak. Instead, it waits for an orbiter, like the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) or MAVEN, to pass overhead. The rover tosses the data up to the orbiter, and the orbiter—which has a much bigger, beefier dish—blasts it toward Earth.
We’re talking about data rates that would make a 1990s dial-up modem look like fiber optics.
Once the data hits the ground stations in places like Goldstone, California, or Madrid, it’s still just raw code. It has to be processed. This is where things get controversial for some people. You’ll see "True Color" vs. "Enhanced Color." True color is what you’d see if you were standing there, which is often hazy and yellowish because of the dust. Enhanced color is what scientists use to make the rocks pop, helping them identify minerals like olivine or carbonates. It looks "fake" to the untrained eye, but it's actually more scientifically "honest" because it reveals the planet’s composition.
The weird things we've found in the dirt
People love to find "aliens" in images of Mars surface. It’s a psychological phenomenon called pareidolia. Our brains are hardwired to see faces and familiar shapes in random patterns.
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Remember the "Face on Mars" from the Viking 1 orbiter in 1976? Total trick of light and shadow. When we went back with better cameras, it was just a lumpy mesa. More recently, people freaked out over a "doorway" in a cliffside captured by Curiosity. It looked like a perfect entrance to an underground bunker. Geologists looked at it and sighed. It was a shear fracture—a natural crack in the rock that just happened to happen in a rectangular shape.
Mars is a master of disguise.
There’s the "jelly doughnut" rock that appeared out of nowhere (it was just stuck in the rover's wheel and popped out). There’s the "thigh bone" rock. There’s even a rock that looks remarkably like a Muppet. But the real treasure in these images isn't the funny shapes. It's the "blue" blueberries—tiny hematite spheres found by the Opportunity rover. These little balls are proof that liquid water once soaked the ground. That’s the real "smoking gun" buried in the pixels.
The resolution revolution
We’ve come a long way from the blurry, grainy shots of Mariner 4 in 1965. Back then, we got 22 low-res photos. Now, we’re getting 4K-quality panoramas.
The HiRISE camera on the MRO is so powerful it can see things on the surface the size of a kitchen table from orbit. It has literally photographed our rovers while they were driving. Think about that. A satellite orbiting another planet, taking a photo of a robot driving across a crater. It's mind-blowing.
But there’s a catch.
Mars has seasons. It has massive dust storms that can cover the entire planet for months. When that happens, the images of Mars surface become useless. Everything turns into a brown soup. This is what eventually killed the Opportunity rover; the dust got so thick that the sun couldn't hit its solar panels. Its last message was basically: "My battery is low and it's getting dark."
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Honestly, that still hurts to think about.
Why the sky looks so weird in photos
On Earth, the sky is blue because of Rayleigh scattering. The atmosphere scatters shorter blue wavelengths of light more than longer red ones. On Mars, the atmosphere is super thin—mostly carbon dioxide—and it’s filled with fine dust.
This dust does the opposite.
During the day, the Martian sky is a sort of pinkish-tan or butterscotch color. But here’s the cool part: the sunsets are blue. If you were standing in Jezero Crater at dusk, the area around the sun would look blue because the dust particles are just the right size to scatter the blue light forward toward your eyes. It’s a complete inversion of what we experience on Earth. Seeing a blue sunset in a Mars photo is one of those moments where you realize just how alien that world really is.
The technical reality of "Raw" images
If you go to the NASA JPL website, you can browse thousands of raw images. They aren't pretty. Many are "stretched" to show detail, meaning the brightness levels are pushed to the extreme.
Scientists don't care about making a pretty wallpaper for your phone. They care about the "Digital Elevation Model." They use stereo pairs—two cameras slightly apart—to create 3D maps. This allows the rover drivers back on Earth to wear VR goggles and "see" the terrain so they don't drive into a sand trap.
Getting stuck in Martian sand is a death sentence. RIP Spirit rover.
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How to find the best images yourself
Don't just trust the "viral" photos you see on social media. They’re often colorized by enthusiasts or, worse, AI-generated to look more dramatic than they are.
If you want the real stuff, go to the source:
- NASA’s Mars Exploration Program website: They have a "Raw Images" feed for Perseverance and Curiosity that updates almost daily.
- The HiRISE (University of Arizona) catalog: This is for orbital photography. The detail is staggering. You can see avalanches happening in real-time at the Martian poles.
- The Planetary Society: They often do the best job of explaining the context of what you’re looking at without the clickbait.
When you look at these images, don't just look for life. Look for the history. Look at the ripples in the sand dunes—those are shaped by winds that have been blowing for millions of years. Look at the smooth, rounded pebbles in the ancient stream beds. Those were tumbled by running water three billion years ago.
Moving forward with your own Martian exploration
If you're looking to dive deeper into the visual history of Mars, stop looking for "aliens" and start looking for geological transitions.
First, compare the images from the Viking missions to the ones from Perseverance. The jump in clarity shows how our sensor technology has evolved from primitive vidicon tubes to advanced CCD and CMOS sensors. Second, pay attention to the scale bars. It’s easy to lose perspective on Mars because there are no trees or houses for reference. A rock that looks like a mountain might only be six inches tall.
Finally, check the "sol" number on the image metadata. A "sol" is a Martian day (about 24 hours and 39 minutes). Following a rover sol-by-sol gives you a sense of the slow, methodical pace of planetary science. It isn't a race. It’s a marathon of pixels and grit.
Start by visiting the JPL Raw Image archive and sorting by "Most Recent." You might be the first human to see a specific rock or patch of sand that hasn't been disturbed for an eon. That’s the real power of these images. They turn us all into explorers from the comfort of a screen.