A new series of NASA posters, free to download, depict Martian explorers surveying the world's alien landscape, growing food, making repairs and teaching youngsters on the surface of the Red Planet.
The awesome Mars travel posters (you can see our full gallery of them here) were created for a 2009 exhibit at the Kennedy Space Center's Visitor Complex in Florida, and now they've been released for free download in high resolution here on NASA's website.
"In the future, Mars will need all kinds of explorers, farmers, surveyors, teachers … but most of all YOU!" NASA officials wrote on the poster web page. "Join us on the journey to Mars as we explore with robots and send humans there one day."
The posters are similar in style to NASA's retro-futuristic space-tourism posters, which depict faraway exoplanets and solar system staples as stylized sightseeing destinations. With these new posters, though, NASA asks for your help in fulfilling the many tasks necessary to explore and colonize a planet.
The posters' depicted activities — mining for resources on Mars' dark moon Phobos, rappelling down the solar system's largest canyon on the Martian surface and building a Martian habitat, among others — are in the far future, but, as the webpage suggests, they offer a reminder from NASA of the programs already in place to explore the Red Planet robotically and develop the technology to visit it in person.
Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.
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