Though he used a brown/red color scheme, the thought that Mars was red did not enter his mind. He really was looking for the colors that best represented a grey scale, since that was what they were going to get anway. It is uncanny how close his color scheme is to the actual colors of Mars. It's as if they came right out of current images of the planet. I’ve seen some of the other color schemes he tried and it could have been green or purple!

In another side story that makes this an even more interesting story, while he and his team were coloring the image, the JPL PR folks were getting nervous that the news media would see this thing and not the “actual” pretty image. They told them to quit, but Grumm argued that this was being done to confirm whether their instrument was working or not. So they allowed him to continue if he did it behind a movable partition wall with armed guards around them! Eventually the media found out about it and got so excited the PR people couldn’t keep them out. So it became the first close-up image of mars to be seen on tv.