A New Photo of Mars Shows the Red Planet in a Color You Probably Were Not Expecting

The Red Planet has a surprisingly complicated relationship with color.

23 Sep 2026, 16:54 by Tudor Tarita · ZME Science

The purple side of Mars near the south pole, captured by the Mars Express spacecraft on February 17, 2026. Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin

I’ve always considered the moniker “Red Planet” as an oversimplification. Mars clearly looks more ochre than crimson up close. Zoom in more and you will realize what a complicated relationship this planet has with the visible spectrum—contrary to popular depictions.

Mars can range from rusty brown to nearly black and brilliant white. And in a striking new image from the European Space Agency, a large patch near the planet’s south pole looks unmistakably purple.

ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft captured the scene around Thyles Rupes, a sprawling system of cliffs in Mars’s southern highlands. Swirls of raspberry, pink, and violet flow across the landscape beside dark volcanic deposits, pale frost, and part of the southern polar cap.

No, Mars has not suddenly sprouted fields of purple rock.

Instead, the image is the result of several familiar Martian ingredients—dust, ice, dark minerals, and sunlight—combining in an unusually colorful way. And it offers a good excuse to revisit my opening statement: calling Mars the Red Planet seriously undersells its palette.

Why Purple?

Map of where the photo was taken. Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin

Mars Express took the image on Feb. 17, 2026, during spring in the planet’s southern hemisphere. But close to the pole, temperatures remain low enough for patches of frozen carbon dioxide to persist.

Those pale areas sit beside much darker deposits left behind by Mars’s volcanic past. The dark material contains minerals such as olivine and pyroxene, both also common in rocks on Earth.

Then there is Mars’s omnipresent dust.

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According to ESA, the purple appearance comes from the way reddish dust, dark surface material, and pale frost combining under the soft morning sunlight. Dust suspended in the atmosphere further changes the colors reaching the camera.

Thyles Rupes from directly above. Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin

Viewed under different illumination, at another time of day or during another season, the same landscape would not necessarily look purple at all.

What’s more, the scenery itself is unusual even without the colors. Thyles Rupes stretches for hundreds of kilometers, with cliffs rising more than a kilometer above the surrounding terrain. Mars lacks Earth-like plate tectonics today, so scientists think these ridges formed long ago as the planet’s hot interior cooled and contracted, crumpling and thrusting parts of its crust upward.

Nearby are frost-covered dunes, impact craters and the edge of Mars’s enormous southern polar cap.

A Wider Palette

Panoramic composite image, taken by Opportunity, shown with two different color assignments. Top image is in “true color,” as human eyes would see Mars, while the bottom is in how human eyes would see the surface in Earth lighting conditions. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Arizona State U.

Purple is only the latest entry in Mars’s surprisingly broad color chart.

If you could stand on its surface, though, the first surprise might be how muted the famous Red Planet actually looks. Much of the rock beneath your boots would be dark gray volcanic basalt, sometimes almost black. What gives Mars its rusty appearance is largely an extraordinarily fine coating of iron-rich dust spread across the ground and continually stirred through the atmosphere.

So scratch beneath the red dust and Mars starts looking rather less red.

Look upward and things get stranger still. During the day, the Martian sky typically appears yellowish, orange, or butterscotch because that same fine dust hangs in the thin atmosphere. But as the Sun sinks toward the horizon, the glow around it can turn blue.

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NASA’s rovers have photographed these eerie blue sunsets several times. Tiny Martian dust particles scatter sunlight in such a way that bluish light becomes concentrated around the setting Sun—almost the reverse of the red sunsets familiar on Earth.

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover recorded this sequence of views of the blue sunset at the close of the mission’s 956th Martian day, or sol (April 15, 2015). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/Texas A&M Univ.

Even the dust responsible for Mars’s most famous color has recently produced a surprise.

Scientists long associated much of the planet’s rusty hue with hematite, an iron oxide. But a 2025 Nature Communications study found that ferrihydrite, a water-bearing iron mineral, better matches the properties of Martian dust.

Ferrihydrite generally forms in the presence of liquid water, suggesting that at least some of the powder coating modern Mars may be a chemical remnant of a much wetter past.