The Martian Chronicles!

 Three countries just launched unmanned missions to the Red Planet in hopes of finding evidence of life. 

Why the fascination with Mars? 

Here's everything you need to know:

The United Arab Emirates kicked off a trio of missions with the July 19 launch of its orbiter, Hope. 

China followed four days later with Tianwen-1 (literally "Questions to Heaven"), a three-pronged mission that includes a lander, a rover, and an orbiter. 

NASA concluded the fireworks on July 30 with Perseverance, designed to put the largest, most sophisticated rover yet on Mars. 

Each of the new missions will arrive at Mars in February, with both NASA and China looking for evidence that there is current microbial life under the surface or that such life once existed there. 

Such a finding would be "extraordinary" and indicate life may exist in many other places in the universe, said Dr. Sarah Johnson, a planetary scientist at Georgetown University. 

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From "The Week!"

What is so interesting about Mars?

The fourth planet from the sun is more like Earth than any of the others. 

It's about half our planet's size, has variable seasons, polar ice caps, and plains and gullies possibly shaped by water flow. "All of that," said David Weintraub, a professor of astronomy at Vanderbilt University, "made it easy for us to tell ourselves that life was likely to have emerged there." 

At the same time, its relative proximity — in October, it will swing to within 38.6 million miles of Earth — has made it seem within reach of a space mission. 

The interest in Mars was ignited in 1877, when the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli noted a series of mysterious lines seemingly etched into the Martian surface. 

He described them as canali, which literally means "channels" but was mistranslated into "canals," carrying the hint they had been constructed by intelligent life. 

The idea was seized upon some 20 years later by the influential American astronomer Percival Lowell, who theorized that the canals were created by an ancient, dying civilization to channel water as the Martian surface dried into the red desert it is today. 

The canals "run for thousands of miles in an unswerving direction, as far relatively as from London to Bombay," Lowell wrote. 

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Later, the lines were proved to be nothing more than an optical illusion.. but still made for grand tales of life on Mars! 

As a matter of fact modern scientific knowledge now claims that Mars is inhabited entirely by robots!

The way I see it anyway!