Blue Sky on Mars
The cover of the album features an image by Viking 1, the first spacecraft to land on Mars; the album's liner notes include additional imagery of the planet's landscape as taken by the spacecraft on July 20, 1976. The text on the cover was done by fantastic artist Roger Dean, best known for his work on album covers for bands such as Yes. The album's title comes from the tour in the film "Total Recall".
Mars program
The Mars 4 and Mars 5 orbiters, launched in 1973, were designed to orbit Mars and return information on the composition, structure, and properties of the Martian atmosphere and surface. The spacecraft were also designed to act as communications links to the Mars 6 and 7 landers. Like earlier heavy spacecraft, they were launched by Proton-K rockets.The Mars 4 orbiter reached Mars on February 10, 1974. Due to a flaw in the transistor 2Т-312 which resulted in its degradation during the voyage to Mars, the retro-rockets designed to slow the craft into Mars orbit did not fire, and Mars 4 flew by the planet at a range of 2200 km. It returned one swath of pictures and some radio occultation data which constituted the first detection of the nightside ionosphere on Mars. It continued to return interplanetary data from heliocentric orbit after the flyby.Mars 5 reached Mars on February 12, 1974 at 15:45 UT and was inserted into an elliptical 1755 by 32,555 km, 24 h 53 min orbit with an inclination of 35.3 degrees. Nearly synchronized with the rotation of the planet, its two phototelevision cameras could be commanded to take 12 pictures during each close approach. The Vega camera used a wide area 52mm lens with color filters, the Zulfar camera used a telescopic 350mm lens and long-pass orange filter. Images were transmitted in a rapid 220-line mode, and then selected pictures were retransmitted at 880 or 1760 line resolution. Mars 5 collected data for 22 orbits until a loss of pressurization in the transmitter housing ended the mission. About 60 images were returned over a nine-day period showing swaths of the area south of Valles Marineris, from to .