If you stood on Mars right now, you would not see the planet you think you know. The red marble from your school textbook, that rust-colored dot in the night sky: up close, it dissolves into something stranger and more beautiful. The ground beneath your feet would be butterscotch and ochre, scattered with dark rocks that a billion years of wind have polished smooth. The sky above you would glow a pale salmon at noon, a haze of iron oxide dust suspended in an atmosphere so thin you could not draw a single breath. And at sunset, the light near the horizon would turn blue.
This is not a guess. We have photographs. Two NASA rovers are on the Martian surface right now, and between them they have returned hundreds of thousands of images that show us exactly what Mars looks like, from the texture of individual grains of sand to panoramas stretching 40 miles to the horizon. The planet that emerges from those pictures is not the featureless red wasteland of science fiction. It is a world of towering volcanoes, continent-spanning canyons, butterscotch skies, and blue sunsets. It is a place.
The Ground, the Sky, the Silence
The colour of Mars is the first thing that surprises you. From orbit, the planet looks uniformly red, the product of iron oxide (essentially rust) in the soil and dust. But on the surface, the palette is far more varied. NASA’s Perseverance rover, which has been exploring Jezero Crater since February 2021, has photographed terrain that ranges from deep chocolate brown to warm butterscotch to pale tan, depending on the rock composition and how much dust has settled. Some rocks are almost black: fine-grained basalt, volcanic in origin, exposed by wind erosion. Others are layered sedimentary formations, grey and cream, deposited billions of years ago when water flowed across this landscape and pooled in an ancient lake.
In May 2025, Perseverance captured a 96-image mosaic at a site the science team calls “Falbreen,” on the rim of Jezero Crater. The panorama, released by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, shows details including individual rocks balanced on sand ripples, the boundary between two geological units, and hills as far as 40 miles in the distance. In an enhanced-colour version, the sky appears deceptively blue, but that is a processing artefact. In natural colour, the Martian sky at midday is a dusty pinkish-tan, sometimes described as butterscotch, created by fine particles of iron oxide suspended throughout the atmosphere.
That atmosphere is vanishingly thin. The surface pressure on Mars is roughly 6 millibars, less than one percent of the atmospheric pressure at sea level on Earth. The air is 95% carbon dioxide. You could not breathe it, and you could not survive in it without a pressurised suit. But it is just thick enough to carry dust, create weather, and scatter light in ways that produce one of the most counterintuitive sights in the solar system: blue sunsets.
On Earth, sunsets are red and orange because the atmosphere scatters shorter (blue) wavelengths of light away from the line of sight, leaving longer wavelengths to colour the horizon. On Mars, the physics reverses. The fine iron oxide dust particles in the Martian atmosphere are just the right size to scatter red light away and allow blue light through. When the sun drops toward the horizon and its light passes through the thickest column of dust, a blue glow spreads around the solar disc. NASA’s Curiosity rover photographed this phenomenon in 2015 from the slopes of Mount Sharp, and the image remains one of the most extraordinary photographs ever taken on another world.
And then there is the silence. Mars has no oceans to roar, no forests to rustle, no cities to hum. Its thin atmosphere can carry sound, but faintly. Perseverance’s SuperCam microphone has recorded the Martian wind: a low, ghostly murmur, punctuated occasionally by the crack of electrical discharges inside passing dust devils. In October 2024, the rover captured audio of tiny sparks and miniature sonic booms generated by static electricity within a dust devil that passed directly overhead. It is the sound of a planet that is almost, but not quite, silent.
The temperature reinforces the hostility. The average surface temperature on Mars is about minus 60 degrees Celsius (minus 80°F). Near the equator at midday in summer, it can briefly climb to a mild 20°C (68°F), but at night, even at the equator, temperatures plunge well below freezing. At the poles in winter, the carbon dioxide atmosphere itself freezes onto the surface as dry ice, and temperatures can reach minus 125°C. Gravity is 38% of Earth’s. You would weigh less than half what you weigh now. Every step would feel buoyant, a little too easy, a little too slow, as if the ground were not entirely committed to holding you.
Landmarks That Dwarf a Continent
Mars is a small planet, about half the diameter of Earth. But its surface features operate on a scale that makes terrestrial geography look modest. Two landmarks, in particular, redefine what you thought a volcano and a canyon could be.
Olympus Mons is the tallest volcano in the solar system. It rises approximately 25 kilometres (16 miles) above the surrounding plains, roughly three times the height of Mount Everest. But its height is not the most remarkable thing about it. Olympus Mons is a shield volcano, meaning its slopes are gradual, built up by millions of years of fluid basaltic lava flows. Its base is 624 kilometres (374 miles) in diameter, approximately the size of the state of Arizona. If you stood on its summit, you would not see its edges. The volcano is so wide that its flanks curve below the horizon in every direction. The caldera at the top, a complex of overlapping collapse craters, is 85 kilometres across, larger than many cities on Earth. At the rim, cliffs drop six kilometres straight down.
Why did it grow so large? On Earth, plate tectonics move the crust over volcanic hotspots, spreading eruptions across chains of smaller volcanoes (like the Hawaiian Islands). Mars has no plate tectonics. Its crust stayed put, and a single hotspot fed lava to the same location for what may have been more than a billion years. The result is a single structure of almost incomprehensible size.
Then there is Valles Marineris. Named for the Mariner 9 orbiter that discovered it in 1971, this canyon system stretches approximately 4,000 kilometres (2,500 miles) along the Martian equator. That is roughly the distance from New York to Los Angeles. It would span the entire continental United States. Individual canyons within the system are up to 200 kilometres wide, and in places the walls plunge 10 kilometres (6 miles) below the rim, making it ten times longer and five times deeper than Earth’s Grand Canyon. When you see it from orbit, it looks less like a canyon and more like a wound: a crack so vast it covers roughly 20% of the planet’s circumference.
Scientists believe Valles Marineris formed as a tectonic rift, a fracture in the Martian crust that opened as the planet’s interior cooled and contracted, pulled apart by the gravitational influence of the massive Tharsis volcanic region to its west. Over billions of years, erosion, landslides, and possibly flowing water widened it into the system we see today. It is geology on a scale that turns the familiar vocabulary of “canyon” and “cliff” into understatement.
These features exist on a world you can see with your naked eye on a clear night. The faint orange dot above the horizon is the same place where a volcano pokes above the atmosphere and a canyon splits a hemisphere. The distance between you and it varies between 55 million and 400 million kilometres, depending on where both planets sit in their orbits. At its closest, light takes just over three minutes to cross the gap.
What the Rovers See Today
Two NASA rovers are actively exploring Mars in 2026, and between them they have painted the most detailed portrait of another planet’s surface that has ever existed.
Curiosity landed in Gale Crater in August 2012 and has been climbing the slopes of Mount Sharp (formally Aeolis Mons) ever since. In late 2025, it sent back a panorama from high on the mountain that reveals ancient terrain shaped by water: intricate networks of mineral-rich ridges, called boxwork patterns, left behind when groundwater flowed through cracks in the rock billions of years ago. Wind stripped away the softer material around them, leaving the hardened veins standing like the skeleton of a long-vanished underground river system. From Curiosity’s vantage point on the mountainside, you can see across the 154-kilometre-wide expanse of Gale Crater to its distant rim.
Perseverance landed in Jezero Crater in February 2021, targeting a site where an ancient river once flowed into a lake and deposited sediment in a fan-shaped delta. The rover has spent the past five years crossing the crater floor, climbing the delta, and collecting rock samples sealed in titanium tubes for a future Mars Sample Return mission. The rocks it has sampled include some of the finest-grained sedimentary deposits ever found on Mars, the kind of material most likely to preserve signs of ancient microbial life, if any ever existed.
One of Perseverance’s most striking recent images is the “Falbreen” panorama from May 2025, a 360-degree view from the crater rim. The enhanced-colour mosaic, assembled from 96 individual Mastcam-Z frames, shows a landscape that is equal parts desolate and magnificent: rippled sand dunes in the foreground, fractured bedrock underfoot, and a horizon of low hills receding into haze. In natural colour, the scene is all tans, browns, and muted oranges, with shadows that are cooler and bluer than you would expect. It looks, more than anything, like a particularly remote stretch of the Atacama Desert or the high plateaus of Iceland, except the sky is the wrong colour and there is nothing alive.
These rovers have also revealed something the orbital photos never could: the textures. The wind-polished pebbles. The razor-thin layers in sedimentary outcrops. The way dust settles into wheel tracks and then, grain by grain, fills them back in. Mars is not a static backdrop. It is a world with weather, with seasons, with dust storms that can grow to engulf the entire planet for months. In 2018, a global dust storm killed the solar-powered Opportunity rover after nearly 15 years of operation. Curiosity and Perseverance, which run on nuclear power, have weathered similar storms and kept working. They have taught us that Mars is not the dead world we once assumed, but a planet that is geologically quiet, perhaps, and biologically silent, as far as we know, yet restless all the same.
The rovers are not alone, either. Orbiters circle overhead: NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, ESA’s Mars Express, and others, mapping the surface in resolutions fine enough to spot the rovers themselves as bright pixels on the ochre ground. Together, this fleet has given us a more complete picture of what Mars looks like than we have of many places on our own planet.
And in the years ahead, humans may follow. The Artemis programme is building the infrastructure and experience for deep-space crewed missions, with Mars as the long-term destination. When the first astronauts step onto that butterscotch soil and look up at a salmon-coloured sky, every photograph from every rover will collapse into a single, overwhelming reality: this is a real place, and we are standing on it.
Somewhere on Mars right now, a rover is driving over rust-coloured sand, and the only sound is the faint crackle of static electricity inside a passing dust devil. The planet does not care whether we come or not. But it is there, and it is waiting, and it looks like nothing else you have ever seen.
