Mars as the cameras actually recorded it. Wind-laid iron-oxide dust sits on dark basalt regolith; the sky is butterscotch because suspended iron(III) oxide scatters light that way. The planet's geometric albedo is 0.17 — the ground is dark, and what reads bright in the panoramas is simply full sun.

Over that ground goes the habitat layer: stencilled equipment plates, cabin-pressure readouts and ISO hazard placards, set in the 1975 NASA graphics discipline rather than in sci-fi styling. Label, value, unit, status. Nothing decorative survives the airlock.