About the colour of Mars..

[Darkstar616]

So.. Mars is a rustic brown colour, a fact NASA has lied about on occasion. From what I've seen the developers are going for the Red Planet type of thing, is this to make the landscapes more appealing like why NASA modified their images or is this because of something else?

I'm not really bothered if it's a design choice but I feel like Mars ought to look as realistically as possible. It's not so much the red planet as it is the brown planet.

 

[Tarhun]

saying "NASA has lied" is ridiculous. The fact is it's incredibly difficult to tell what the "actual" colours of another planet would look like to a human eye because there's no common frame of reference. The best they can do is use a calibration device, with a swatch of known colour references, but even that will appear differently depending on the position of the sun in the sky, atmospheric conditions, dust in the air, etc. The colour swatch can give them a clue but at some point they have to make a choice about how they colour the image one way or another. It comes down to a matter of opinion.

We won't know for sure which version is more true until there's actual human eyeballs on the surface viewing these features. And even then, there might be disagreement - e.g. I'd imagine a human who just arrived from Earth would see things differently compared to a life long Martian whose eyes had adapted to the dimmer sun.

 

[Lt Loco]

I was curious so I traced what image that is. It's from a website that when searched in google yields:
"Soul:Ask | Unlock your mind and soul · Aliens & UFO's · Spirituality · Ancient · Conspiracy Theories · Fact or fiction · Ghosts & Hauntings · Paranormal · Mysteries · Underworld · Apocalypse & Armageddon · Occult · Bizzare & Odd · Metaphysics & Psychology · Planet Earth · Science & Technology · Cryptozoology · Space."

Given that list of things, I'm not really sure I'm going to trust the validity of someone (that is, the creator of that image) claiming to have The Real Truth about what Mars looks like to human eyes. I suspect you didn't pick that as your source intentionally - a google search probably yielded a picture like what you were looking for.

Regardless!

It looks like someone used a filter on the "Reality" side to remove a lot of the red; what that means is that the "Reality" side of that image is showing what the dirt would look like if your eyes were less sensitive to the red portion of the spectrum (allowing you to see more of the blue/green/etc details). Neat! ... but that isn't really reality. It's just a color correction for "what if our eyes were adjusted* for Mars rather than for Earth" As it is, if I was teleported to Mars today, I'd expect to see the NASA side, and not the "Reality" side.

* By adjusted, you can mean created, evolved, whatever. The point is that our eyes see the color frequencies they do because they are helpful to us. Just like animals with an infrared-biased sight spectrum enjoy the benefits of seeing better at night, our eyes are highly effective at seeing during the daytime on Earth through our atmosphere - and not really effective on Mars, where they're flooded with the red spectrum and won't be able to see all the fine color details they could on Earth.

EDIT: For * explanation, and to make sure I was being clear about whose credibility I was judging (the website, not the OP)

 

[PogoMarimo]

Er... Mars IS red. The Mars soil contains a high density of iron oxide particles which, even if we never took a picture of the surface of the planet, we would know is red. Mars isn't uniformly red of course, as no planet is any one color, but I'm afraid wherever you are getting your supposed facts on this subject from is objectively wrong.

 

[grandad1982]

Regardless of which image is right or not, from a game point of view would you rather have an map that looks like a brown quake clone or a colourful red.

 

[mrinku]

May I suggest that people actually go over to NASA and have an actual look at their images? The old brick red images tend to be decades old before they landed the modern rovers with far more sophisticated cameras.

https://mars.nasa.gov/mer/spotlight/spirit/a12_20040128.html

And the various disclaimers about filters and colour corrections thereof. Yeah, NASA colour correct, but they hardly LIE about it. Almost all Mars photos are tweaked, because the light levels on a realistic image would make it look like late evening. It's not really correct to say "we don't know what a human eye would see". We have a pretty good idea now.

 

[spartansociety]

Nice link mrinku. You can even go to the image section and view the Raw images from any of the cameras if you want.

 

[ringhloth]

There isn't really such a thing as a "real" color, anyway. There is a lot of "priming" that goes with sight, and even your sleep schedule affects how you perceive colors. If you lived on Mars for awhile, you'd probably see something closer to a bland beige. If you were to teleport straight there, you'd see more reds.

 

[Darkstar616]

I'd rather not delve into the conspiracy aspect since it's largely inflated anyway. I could've either said NASA lied or tweaked their photos, it's the same thing. I don't care about personally saving the reputation of a foreign space agency.

And as pointed out by one of the links that goes to actual Martian surface pictures you can plainly see it's a rusty brown and not a bright red. You can also pull as many as hairs from this as you want, whether NASA tweaked their early photos for investment marketing or because "humans see things differently sometimes" is irrelevant.

The real colour of Mars (generally) is a rusty brown, not a bright red as depicted in the game or in other media - that's a fact. My question was regarding that and that alone.

Cheers.

 

[Badesumofu]

I'd rather not delve into the conspiracy aspect since it's largely inflated anyway.

What an incredibly disingenuous thing to write. If you didn't want to delve into the conspiracy, then you shouldn't accuse NASA of lying.

I could've either said NASA lied or tweaked their photos, it's the same thing.

No, no it is not. Stating that an organisation is lying implies that they are deliberately setting out to deceive people. That is not at all the same as tweaking images.

If you don't want to delve into a conspiracy, then next time try maybe not alleging a conspiracy. Especially when you have no basis for doing so.

 

[Darkstar616]

What an incredibly disingenuous thing to write. If you didn't want to delve into the conspiracy, then you shouldn't accuse NASA of lying.



No, no it is not. Stating that an organisation is lying implies that they are deliberately setting out to deceive people. That is not at all the same as tweaking images.

If you don't want to delve into a conspiracy, then next time try maybe not alleging a conspiracy. Especially when you have no basis for doing so.

Again. I couldn't care less about NASA. Them altering their images was simply the basis for a question, if you have a problem with that then maybe don't bother posting if you have nothing relevant to add to the actual question. Cheers.

 

[Lt Loco]

I'd rather not delve into the conspiracy aspect since it's largely inflated anyway. I could've either said NASA lied or tweaked their photos, it's the same thing. I don't care about personally saving the reputation of a foreign space agency...

Again. I couldn't care less about NASA. Them altering their images was simply the basis for a question, if you have a problem with that then maybe don't bother posting if you have nothing relevant to add to the actual question. Cheers.

So, what, people aren't supposed to defend NASA if they do care about it's reputation, just because you've deemed it doesn't matter? NASA gets funds only at the whim of the public; PR matters to NASA because it's the only way they get money to do things that are interesting - like sending probes to Mars so we can quibble about if the color is right or not. If someone does care about NASA, they care about its reputation a great deal. Telling people to not to "bother posting if you have nothing relevant" is simply rude, especially when you haven't proven that it isn't relevant.

If you don't want to delve into a conspiracy, then next time try maybe not alleging a conspiracy.

That out of the way, it sounds like your question in the OP was "Why is Mars in Surviving Mars so red, when in reality it's a lot more brown?" - of which, I'm pretty sure the answer is that Surviving Mars is a retro-styled game. Before we had actual pictures of the surface, the best we could go off of was the color of Mars in the sky. That is significantly more red than other bodies (because the red end of the spectrum is going to come through a lot clearer than the browns), and so Mars has always been known as "the red planet", in the same way that while our world is both blue and green and brown, it's often referred to a "the blue planet" even though there's literally other planets in our solar system that are blue. Regardless, it's still pretty brown in the game.

Compare:

NASA image, taken from Curiosity

It's dustier in the Surviving Mars image, but you can still see that little blue sky trying to peek out over the mountains. Yes, it's more red than the Curiosity image (which is after NASA started trying to "get the color right") but not significantly more so. It's worth noting that the terrain looks more brown in some SM screenshots than others - probably due to lighting.