Martian Art

NASA now has an official Mars as Art gallery, featuring some surprisingly good photographs from the "Total Recall Planet." For a place no humans have visited, they came up with a good list. Just more proof of something we all know deep down: the robots don't need us, even for art. Oh, and while we're at it, here are some Martian pictures by those other reds, the Soviets for comparison. They are all pretty lousy. It is a strange thing, after trying a few missions to Mars in the 60's and early 70's the USSR sort of gave up and sent a ton of probes to Venus instead, while we kept, and continue to be obsessed with Mars. I don't really get it, did we each feel like cornering the market on our own particular planet instead of competing? Is it some cultural thing? I still think Venus is cool, but the next mission there isn't for another 3 years. And even that isn't one of the cool kind that crashes into the planet and gets eaten away by acid. Terrible job.

[via]