Wow, frisson-producing photograph [1]. I remember waiting for the mars rover to land on NASA TV, and watching the celebration [2]. Can't imagine what it might have felt like watching the moon landing live.
The colors are not entirely accurate, but the fact that it's bluer near the sun and redder farther away is accurate- the image just exaggerates it.
The reason is that red dust particles in Mars's atmosphere scatter red light just like gas molecules in Earth's atmosphere scatter blue light; there isn't enough atmosphere on Mars for the blue-scattering effect to be significant, so red scattering off of dust particles dominates. That means that when you look near the sun, you see the blue part of the spectrum shining through while the red parts have been scattered off-axis, while in the parts of the sky away from the sun you see the off-axis scattered red.
