Art and science combine to shape our conception of Mars, and how we think about humanity’s future.

After a journey of nine months and 120 million miles, NASA’s $420 million Phoenix lander touched down May 25 in the polar region of Mars. Although Phoenix’s main mission is to explore the ice below the surface for traces of life, it is also meant to capture images of the landscape.
However, color images are too difficult to transmit, and so Phoenix will only send back gray-scale photographs. To approximate color, the lander takes its images through red, green and blue filters. Because the filters record a smaller segment of the electromagnetic spectrum than humans see, we aren’t receiving “true” images of Mars.
Once the photos are beamed back, scientists begin their task of bridging the gap between reality and imagination. They must stitch the small images into mosaics and “paint” the color of the landscape.
And that has a major impact on how we perceive the Red Planet. “We understand the world largely by looking and seeing what’s there. And we see that when we go to another planet. The first thing we want to do is look around,” says Chris McKay, a planetary scientist at NASA’s AMES Research Center, who was instrumental in the planning of the mission.
This process of piecing these images together illustrates the blurry line that separates fact and fiction in the way we view the cosmos. There are two different worlds that unite to construct our visions of Mars: science and art.

Mankind has spent a lot of time fictionalizing what the Red Planet and its inhabitants look like. Our interactive feature gives you a sampling of the myriad of pop cultural references to Mars and Martians.Artists have long helped to shape our perceptions of Mars.
In 1877, the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli saw etched lines covering the surface of the Red Planet. He named these lines “canali,” to mean gullies or grooves. The word canali was mistranslated into English: they were renamed canals. Ever since, we have been gazing at Mars, wondering if it once had water.
At the turn of the 20th century Percival Lowell spent a fortune building an observatory in Arizona to gaze at what he believed to be the Martian capital, Solis Lacus. Lowell imagined that those canals were evidence of an entire civilization with a government and the technological know-how to engineer those complex aqueducts.
Turns out there are no cities on Mars, no governments and no canals.
However, this elaborate fantasy gripped our imaginations well into the 1950s, as pulp fiction and science fiction novels depicted a race of aliens inhabiting an advanced civilization.
Scientists look toward artists to capture how humanity both colors Mars and how we want to see it. Likewise, artists look toward scientists for inspiration for their futuristic outlooks.
The planetary scientist Chris McKay, futurist painter Roy Scarfo and photographer Tamir Sher all use raw images of Mars as a foundation for their visions of the future.
Watch Chris McKay, a planetary scientist for NASA, as he speaks about Phoenix and the possibility of finding life on Mars. Also, listen to McKay describe how the landscape of the dry valleys of Antarctica mirrors that of Mars.Tapping the Ice
Chris McKay, a planetary scientist at NASA’s AMES Research Center, has traveled from the Gobi Desert to the dry valleys of Antarctica to prepare for what Phoenix may discover. “Ice is where the record of biology is going to be found,” he says.
“If Phoenix finds organic material in the ice, then for sure we will push for another mission to go back to that site, and drill down even deeper,” he says.
If Phoenix finds signs that life did once exist on Mars, McKay is already pondering how to re-create the conditions that supported it.
Factories spewing greenhouse gases could actually help. “We know how to warm up planets—we’re doing it on Earth where it’s not a good idea. If we did it on Mars, that would be just what the doctor ordered.” If there’s nothing there, McKay argues that we should send seeds to get the process started.
For now, his team is analyzing the images being beamed back from Mars. “We get an immediate understanding: this looks like places in Antarctica,” he says. “We can draw parallels just by looking at the pictures.”
And if McKay’s vision is realized, one day, life forms will gaze at that landscape first-hand without having to resort to comparisons.
Watch Roy Scarfo, a top space artist, as he talks about the possibilities for humanity’s future life in space and on Mars.The Future, As It Looked Yesterday
Fifty years ago, Roy Scarfo began envisioning our future in space.
In 1957, Scarfo landed a job as an artist at General Electric’s space technology center in Valley Forge, Pa. For the next few decades, he collaborated with top scientists (like Dandridge M. Cole, an influential futurist) to illustrate the possibility of commercial space travel.
Scarfo has helped generate the imagery that has shaped humanity’s dreams of living in space. He created many space-oriented illustrations for the New York Times and has worked with scientists, writers and filmmakers including Werner von Braun, Isaac Asimov, Willy Ley and Stanley Kubrick.
“At that time, we did not know as much as we know now,” he says. Scarfo was imagining what space looked like before we had even landed on the Moon, but his visions still resonate.
“I know a lot of scientists believe—which I also believe—that Mars was at some time in the same orbit that Earth is. I believe it did contain life, and it moved on out and life became extinct.” When Earth eventually follows that same fate, Scarfo believes, we will form “the ultimate society.”
The society he foresees will colonize the Moon and Mars, constructing massive underground cities that look like air bubbles connected by passageways. Some cities will be built inside asteroids with populations of up to one million. There will be huge luxury hotels in orbit around the planets, and massive spacecraft will allow for deep space travel.
Scarfo is also on the board of trustees of the International Association of Astronomical Artists. Their manifesto links them to the explorers of the 19th century (like George Catlin): “armed with science, creativity and imagination, [space artists] construct realistic images of visions throughout our Universe.”
These images and ideas are part surrealist and part realist, but Scarfo insists they’re not so impractical. One day, life will literally move on, leaving the Earth behind.

Bringing Mars Home
Upon first seeing raw images from Mars, Tamir Sher, an Israel photographer, had an instant reaction.
“The first thing was the horizon. I saw those amazing pictures from Mars. I saw the line between the earth and the sky and it was so clear, so basic, so old,” says Sher, whose series “Mars” and “After Mars” are composite images of human-constructed structures with a skyline from deep space.
It is the kind of atmosphere that might be similar to the one on Mars, bringing the two worlds together. “Tel Aviv shares the same cosmos as Mars,” Sher says. “Somehow we’re in the same air.”
His photographs conflate the earthly and the heavenly; the dark skies make it seem like night, and yet the buildings are lit as if they were under a rare golden afternoon sun. The deafening darkness of the eerie skies highlights the Earthly features below. Which world are we in? Which world do we belong to?
The golden glow is inspired by the images that have been beamed back from Mars over the years, and Sher searches for that same sort of light here on Earth. “Where I live, in Tel Aviv, there are only a few weeks out of the year when in the afternoon you can get this kind of light.”
His fascination with merging the two planets and discovering his own “world” stems from his youth. Growing up in a Kibbutz, he had little private space: “I really had to find my place of intimacy.” His photography allowed him to find a room of his own.
However, his imagery is more than just about bringing Mars home. It’s also about how extraterrestrials might perceive our world. His photographs open up a new era of science fiction, in which extraterrestrials are no longer the main subject, but we are.
“I really want to connect the frame to something bigger than what you see,” Sher says. His images hint that there is something very big (whether it be another world or life form) just outside of our vision, which we cannot understand.
Listen to Tamir Sher explain the motivation behind his photography and explore some of his most powerful images in full-screen glory.