A Simple Science Project with Application to Moon and Mars
Testing Colors for Survival on Moon and Mars

Experiment Focus: In most terrestrial locations, even in mountainous and desert settings, the blues of the sky and the greens of vegetation compliment the earthtones of the local geology. This is not the case on either Moon or Mars which are alike in manifesting a fairly narrow range of coloration with a high degree of variegation and texture.,

I devised a simple experiment to test which colors are most easily picked out against the local Mars-hued landscapes surrounding the Mars Desert Research Station. While certainly not the color range of the Moonscapes we have visited, it was my hope that the lessons learned from this experiment at MDRS, would have some value for lunar applications as well.

Expectations: I had my suspicions that lighter shades of green and blue would stand out most prominently. Why? If you take a color photo of a Marsscape and invert it in your paint program, that is what you get: light greens and blues: the opposite of Mars hues: "Mars' Missing Colors." You can check this out at: http://members.aol.com/tanstaaflz/petesmars_projects.htm

Experiment Materials: First, I picked up one each of every color paper sheet my nearest Kinkos had in stock, some 19 different shades including many pastels and all the astrobrights™. Next I bought a 24-pack of transparent plastic drinking cups. The idea here was to find something stackable and compact for air travel. I cut the bottom off of one cup, cut down one side, rolled it out and made a template. This I used to cut out shapes from the color sheets. These I applied to the sides of intact cups, securing the paper with tape. I took my stacked color cups outdoors, found a pile of handy pebbles and put enough in the bottom of each cup to keep the cups from being tossed here and there by the wind.

Experiment Deployment: Then I looked for nearby hillocks and set the cups out randomly here and there in two different locations.

Later, results chart in hand, I stood at various distances from the cups, up to 200 yards/meters. The round shape meant that sun angle did not matter much. But I did return to check again at various times during the day, again at dusk.

Experiment Results and Surprises: I had expected, namely that bright blues, greens, and blue-greens would work best. That expectation was not validated.

• Solid Consistent Color and Regular Shape are the most critical elements for recognition from a distance. Together, they jump out from random pattern and variegated coloration.
  
  
• Any colors outside of the background color range are easily picked out by the eye, but especially the lighter and brighter ones: yellows, lighter blues, blue-greens, greens, pinks and fuscias (red is too dark).
  
  
• In deepening dusk, darker colors, even those well out of the local landscape palette, are hard to see. Light, bright, astro colors best.
  
  
• But even colors within the background color range stand out if they are used in regular, solid, untextured shapes. This was the biggest surprise for the investigator.

Principal Lesson: Vehicles, spacesuits, road signs of regular shape and solid colors will be easy to see on Mars or the Moon. Fancy, multi-color patterned paint jobs would delay identification of vehicles. Highly textured surfaces would also delay identification.