NASA Mars Curiosity: A desolate vision of the future of Mars exploration

In the wake of Curiosity's landing on Mars, artist Kelly Richardson's depictions of a post-apocalyptic Red Planet are a call for us to save our own planet

IT'S 200 years from now, and the sun beats down on a barren landscape of red rock scattered with smashed satellites and dilapidated robots.

NASA's battered old Curiosity rover lies wedged on a mound of dirt, its wheels whirring intermittently in futile effort, like an exhausted beetle stuck on its back.

This bleak Mars-scape is the work of Canadian artist Kelly Richardson. Mariner 9, a 12-metre long, hyper-realistic video installation, named after a NASA orbiter, offers a glimpse at a possible reality for the future of humanity on other planets.

Richardson worked closely with the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment at the University of Arizona in Tucson and NASA to make sure elements such as the spacecraft that already exist and the composition of the rocks were accurate and realistic.

Facts couldn't fill in all the details though, and that is where Richardson's imagination took over. "Because it's a futurescape, of course I had to imagine what craft we might produce from this point," she says.

The result is a breathtaking yet peaceful panorama. At first glance, the footage could be mistaken for a photograph.

Movements in the scene are subtle and hypnotic - a gust of sand blows, the shadows shift and the robots whirr. An eerie soundscape accompanies it all.

Alongside the degeneration is construction. Pipes protrude from the ground - although it is open to speculation who or what built them.

That kind of ambiguity is important to Richardson. Take the two pulsing beacons in the middle distance, reminiscent of a landing strip.

"Maybe they're calling to other spacecraft that are on their way, or perhaps they had functioned that way before, or they could be sending data back to whomever, possibly no one," she says.

The idea that there may be nobody home to pick up these signals resonates with Richardson's other works, which often depict post-apocalyptic scenes of Earth's future.

Mariner 9 is suffused with the same concerns for the environment and humanity. "I don't want to depress people, but at the same time it would be great if we all woke up and decided to take charge of the situation," she says.

If we don't, Curiosity's successful landing on Mars could be one more fateful step towards realising this prophecy.