A Little History

Photo courtesy NASA Click here to learn all about the Mars rovers, Opportunity and Spirit.

As you can see from the image below, Mars has few distinguishing features when viewed from Earth, even with the best telescopes. There are dark and light areas, as well as polar ice caps, but certainly not the clear features that you can see in images from orbiters around Mars. So it was easy for astronomers to make mistakes or embellish their observations. To early astronomers, Mars was a vastly different world than we know today.

In 1877, Giovanni Schiaparelli, an Italian astronomer, was the first person to create a map of Mars. In his map, he showed a system of channels or canali, which has been translated to canals in English. Later, in 1910, Percival Lowell, an American astronomer, made observations of Mars and wrote a book. In his book, Lowell described Mars as a dying planet where the civilizations built an extensive network of canals to distribute water from the polar regions to the center of the planet.

Photo courtesy NASA/Space Telescope Science Institute Photo by David Crisp and WFPC2 Science Team (JPL/CalTech) View of Mars from the Hubble Space Telescope

Although Lowell's book captured the imagination of the public, it was not seriously considered by the scientific community because his observations were not confirmed. Nevertheless, Lowell's writings sparked generations of science fiction writers. Edgar Rice Burroughs of Tarzan fame wrote several novels about Martian societies, including A Princess of Mars, The Gods of Mars and Warlord of Mars . H.G. Wells wrote The War of the Worlds about invaders from Mars (Orson Wells' radio play of this book caused a national panic in 1938). Ray Bradbury wrote a story about the conflicts between Martians and colonizing humans called The Martian Chronicles. And Hollywood has also fueled the public's fascination with Mars in films like The Angry Red Planet, Invaders from Mars and, more recently, Mission to Mars.

In 1971, the U.S. space probe, Mariner 9, orbited Mars and sent back images of a very different world from that described by Lowell. The images showed Mars as a dry, barren, lifeless world with variable weather that often included massive dust storms that could spread across a majority of the planet.

In 1976, the U.S. space probes Viking 1 and 2 orbited and landed on Mars. Their findings confirmed those of Mariner 9. Mars was indeed a rust-colored, desert planet with rocks and boulders.

Photo courtesy NASA Artist's conception of the touchdown of the Viking lander

Photo courtesy NASA/JPL First photograph of the surface of Mars from Viking 1 lander

Photo courtesy NASA/NSSDC View of Mars from Viking 2 lander

Now, we have extensively mapped the surface of Mars with Mars Global Surveyor, and landed in another area with the Mars Pathfinder mission. NASA has committed to an extensive program of robotic and possibly human exploration of Mars.