Amid the excitement of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, another revelatory mission was gathering data about Mars. A pair of spacecraft, Mariners 6 and 7, obtained closeups of selected regions and lower resolution views of the entire planet as they approached. This is the first color spacecraft photograph ever made of Mars, taken by Mariner 7 in late July 1969. 244K

 The original version of the first color photo returned from the surface of Mars. In this first release the Viking imaging team was initially unsure of the color of the sky and told the JPL photolab to balance the sky color a neutral gray. During the night shift the color balance somehow shifted towards the blue and the result was a surprisingly Earthlike Mars, widely reproduced in news magazines and television. While superseded by later work, this was the first impression many had of what our neighbor world looked like on the ground. A few people continue to circulate claims that Mars really looks like this, generally with conspiratorial overtones. 180K

   A later color image of a similar scene, with more of the lower field of view revealed. Note the lighter 'subsoil' layer exposed by the lander descent engine at the lower left. The overall neutral gray paint on the Viking lander and the dull 'brass' like color of the soil sampler housing assist in determining a reasonable color balance. 192K

Viking 1 returned color images of its rocky surroundings in sections over time. Here is a composite of the camera 2 color images made with similar lighting conditions, with an artistically added sky. 128K.

This Viking 2 panorama was assembled from two images taken on somewhat different times of day. The tilt of the spacecraft is partially corrected by use of 'shear' filter in Photoshop. In retrospact, despite great effort using visual and radar data of the landing sites available at the time, both landers ended up among the rockiest places on the planet! 772K

Soil colors in the vicinity of the Pathfinder lander, recolored from the original garish enhanced version to more closely approximate the probable colors of Mars under neutral white lighting. 200K

Pathfinder's panorama, shown here with some effort to show something resembling the true colors of the scenery and sky. This was done as a background to an animation so the Rover has not driven to the large rock 'Yogi' yet! The pre rover deployment panorama was used to 'fill in' the ground later marked up by the little rover. 248K

MER-A obtained these partial color panoramas looking across the crater 'Boneville' from two locations along the rim. The lighting changed in the interval between both panoramas, bringing out the textures along the crater floor as the shadows lengthened. 140K

On April 30 the MER-B rover ('Opportunity') obtained color images of the sunset with the L4, 5, and 6 filters which when combined provide an image with reasonable color fidelity. The original images, including the green (L5) filtered image seen here, caught half the inner twilight glow, with the right edge of the frame just catching the setting Sun. I first registered the Sun, which moved between the exposures, and the inner glows to the green image and obtained a plausable looking match in all 3 colors. I then 'mirrored' the frame and placed it so the Sun was a circle partially revealed from both sides. I then artistically 'filled in' the narrow middle strip of missing data. This supercedes earlier similar images based on grayscale images. 96K.

This twilight panorama was obtained by MER-B. This image was hand colorised from a trio of gray scale images made with the wide angle NAVCAM on sol 101. Thin high blueish clouds can be seen looming above the dusty lower atmosphere. 52K

The succesful part of the recent European Mars mission, the European Space Agency 'Mars Express' spacecraft, carries a high quality multispectral camera which promises a rich harvest of pseudo color Mars images in the coming years. This color image of the Gusev landing site region as been adjusted from the garish original release seen here. to more closely match the probable colors, in the overexposed fashion one might see through a super telescope or visually from orbit. The dark regions which appear blue or even green in some images are exposed dark gray basaltic rock, which when particularly free of dust often appears a dark neutral gray. Another newer version of a color balance resembling the 'ground view' of the colors of the surface seen by the 'Spirit' rover can be seen here. 252K

This oblique view of Olympus Mons was altered by 'bending' the image to suggest the curvature of the horizon of Mars, and the gray scale image was 'colorised' to roughly approximate natural color. 124K