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".
Exploration of Mars
In August 2012, NASA selected "InSight", a $425 million lander mission with a heat flow probe and seismometer, to determine the deep interior structure of Mars. Two flyby CubeSats called MarCO were launched with "InSight" on 5 May 2018 to provide real-time telemetry during the entry and landing of "InSight". The CubeSats separated from the Atlas V booster 1.5 hours after launch and traveled their own trajectories to Mars. "InSight" landed successfully on Mars on 26 November 2018.
Other future mission concepts include polar probes, Martian aircraft and a network of small meteorological stations. Longterm areas of study may include Martian lava tubes, resource utilization, and electronic charge carriers in rocks. Micromissions are another possibility, such as piggybacking a small spacecraft on an Ariane 5 rocket and using a lunar gravity assist to get to Mars.