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[Flying Dice]

Hematite is a mineral, colored black to steel or silver-gray, brown to reddish brown, or red. While the forms of hematite vary, they all have a rust-red streak.

[Azkanan]

iirc, Mars is red because it's supposedly covered in rust/iron oxide.

[zchris13]

And some iron ores are literally composed of rust. Like hematite.

[Loud Whispers]

Hematite is a mineral, colored black to steel or silver-gray, brown to reddish brown, or red. While the forms of hematite vary, they all have a rust-red streak.

Well it doesn't sound like hematite then :/

[Starver]

the magazines saturate the images to make it in-line with the public view of mars, which was brought about by one of the mars probe's (voyager?) images being more red than it should have been.

Something, IIRC, to do with assumptions over the colour of the sky, thus changing the colour balance.  Though that might also be a urban legend of some kind.

(And you probably meant Viking.  Voyagers 1 and 2 are space probes wandering out of the solar system.  There are about half a dozen successful Mars landers out of many other attempts.  I don't think any soviet attempts succeeded (beyond crashing, and some actually missed Mars altogether), the British one went missing and the US ones I know succeeded are Vikings 1 & 2, Sojourner, the Spirit/Opportunity pair and Phoenix.  Don't the US have another one on the way as we write?  I don't keep as up-to-date on this stuff as I used to...  Anyway, given the usual fate of Martian missions, I give it odds of 50:50... )

[G-Flex]

thankee for the correction.

anyway, look at pictures directly from sites or from a reputable book, and it'll probably show mars' surface as grey.

I'm looking it up right now, and I can't find any photos of Martian soil that don't show it as reddish-brown, supposedly due to high iron oxide content (as was mentioned).

It's not incredibly red, but it's certainly red by Earth standards.

[Grek]

So, is the OP coming back?

[Tellemurius]

So, is the OP coming back?

I hope so, i was pulling the geologist classes out of my bag till of course i hit the last page.