3 missions aim at enigma of Red Planet

A billion-dollar volley of space missions, due to start on Monday, may at last answer the question: does life, or the potential for it, exist on the Red Planet?

A bloodied body named after the Roman god of war; the home of "canals" spotted by astronomer Percival Lowell; of terrifying aliens in H.G. Wells' "The War of the Worlds"; or a verdant twin for Earth in Ray Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles": Mars holds a central place in our imagination of the cosmos.

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No other planet has been targeted by so many space probes, not least because Venus, Earth's closest neighbour, is an uninhabitable hellhole with an atmosphere of toxic soup.

But the mission record is littered with disasters, and those few that have succeeded only seem to have swollen the great martian mystery with each turn.