Not to be outdone by NASA’s series of exoplanet travel posters, SpaceX has revealed a similarly-styled series of designs to promote interest in making it to Mars (and ultimately colonizing the planet if Elon Musk has his way).

First stop: Valles Marineris, a seriously grand canyon spanning thousands of miles on the surface of the red planet and extending down to 3 miles in its deepest valleys. It may even have been formed by running water in the ancient past.

And then there is Olympus Mons, the tallest peak in our solar system standing three times higher than Mount Everest. The jury is still out on whether it is volcanic, but perhaps a group of scientifically interested Martian tourists could settle the debate either way.

Finally, we have Phobos and Deimos, moons of Mars each smaller than our own lunar sphere. Deformed by their proximity to the planet, these are not the rounded moon shapes we are used to. They also may end up making sense as a first place to settle around Mars as a set of transit hubs.

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Finding life on Mars has been a benchmark of space exploration progress for decades, hence our fascination with the Curiosity rover and all of the data it provides NASA. But some people think that Curiosity will never find anything just scraping the surface and taking shallow rock samples. They think that, if the red planet currently supports living organisms, evidence of that life could be buried deep beneath the surface.

A non-profit startup called Explore Mars wants to launch (pun very much intended) an ambitious project to find life under Mars’ surface. They call it ExoLance, and they’re raising funds for the endeavor on Indiegogo. According to Explore Mars, all data collected so far from Mars clearly shows that the planet is – or was at some point – able to support life.

Given the harsh conditions on Mars’ surface, the team – led by the former director of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program – believe that extant life forms likely retreated underground. If this is true, Curiosity is not equipped with the proper tools to explore those life-supporting regions and won’t return the results that so many of us are hoping it will find.

The ExoLance project would address this problem in a half scary/half totally logical way: by firing several penetrating probes into the surface of Mars. As the delivery vehicle carrying the arrows approaches the planet, kinetic energy would help launch the arrows a couple of meters down below the surface. The arrows would then break in two, with the top part remaining on the surface as a communication link and the bottom part holding the scientific measuring equipment.

From there, the probe that’s embedded in the surface would measure key markers that would indicate whether current living organisms are present. Additionally, the instruments would measure whether the organisms are similar to those found on Earth or have a completely different composition. If the Indiegogo campaign is successful, the group will test their hardware by firing arrows from aircraft into the surface of the Mojave desert. The experiment will determine whether the probes can withstand the impact and burrow to the depth needed to collect useful samples.

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The first humans who will live on Mars are alive today, according to Dutch company Mars One. Their ambitious plan is to begin the first colony on the red planet in 2023 with four astronauts who will forever say goodbye to the planet of their birth. Privately-funded Mars One will begin the mission by sending out rovers which will construct the living quarters for the colonists. In late 2022, four lucky astronauts will begin the journey to their new home, arriving seven months later to become permanent residents. Every two years after that, two more colonists will make the trip, expanding the colony, bringing supplies and enlarging the available gene pool for future generations.

Mars One plans to rely on a rather novel fundraising method to finance this long-running mission: the world’s first space reality show. The entire population of Planet Earth will be transfixed, according to the company, on the trials and successes of the newly-formed colony. Because the mission is fraught with the unknown and the constant possibility of danger, there will be no need for the scripted drama or “challenges” presented on Earth-bound reality TV. The company will begin selecting potential colonists beginning on 2013, kicking off an entire decade of training and preparation for the lucky few who will one day go where no human has gone before.

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Fourteen years ago, NASA scientists triumphantly proclaimed that they’d found proof of life on Mars. Then-president Bill Clinton gave a press conference and postulated about all of the future wonders that awaited us. And then, for over a decade, we heard almost nothing about the telltale life-containing Antarctic meteorite. While the matter may have fallen away from the public’s immediate concern, NASA scientists haven’t forgotten about that promising discovery. In fact, they’re more convinced than ever that Mars at one time harbored microscopic life.

The original 1996 discovery centered on the discovery of microbial fossils in a 4-billion-year-old Mars meteorite that fell in Antarctica thousands of years ago. Scientists were able to identify the origin of the meteorite because the gases in them match gases found in Mars’ atmosphere. And the microbe fossils in the meteorites suggest that Mars was once a very different place than it is today: warmer, water-bearing, and with a protective atmosphere. Critics said that the fossils weren’t necessarily proof of life, leading an inter-disciplinary team of scientists to embark on a whole new kind of scientific journey: one based on simulations, inferences and the kind of detective work that the astronomy community loves to engage in. The result wasn’t definitive proof that Mars supported life at one time – but the report showed that the microbes couldn’t have come from non-biological sources. So while the scientists aren’t saying definitely that there is life on Mars, they are slowly making progress in disproving the critics.

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Since the 1950s, humans have been sending spacecraft, animals and ourselves into space in an effort to understand our universe. Not surprisingly, a lot of our space exploration has involved checking out the other planets in our solar system. Mars has been of particular interest, partially because it’s so close, but lately because we’ve seen some evidence of life-supporting potential there. We’ve sent so many missions to Mars, in fact, that Bryan Christie Design put together a beautiful infographic to help us keep track of them all. (Click the picture below to see a full-size version.)

Some of these missions have been successful, and some never reached their destination. And although any space mission is still somewhat risky, we’ve gotten considerably better at completing missions successfully. Just in the last decade, the success rate has increased significantly. (It should be noted that the Russian Phobos-Grunt expedition which was planned for 2009 has been delayed until 2011.) Future missions to the red planet will continue to provide even more useful information about one of our closest neighbors…and maybe one day we’ll get to see it for ourselves.

The post There and Back Again: A Visual Guide to Every Mars Mission first appeared on Gajitz.