Space: Onward to Mars

A dramatic launch heralds a new era of missions to the Red Planet

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"These missions are novel and trail-blazing," says Cornell University Astronomer Carl Sagan, president of the Planetary Society and the man who first proposed a joint manned mission to Mars. "In terms of science, we'll all find out a lot about Phobos." Furthermore, he says, "in the long run, Phobos could act as a staging platform for human missions to Mars. It could also be a place where humans could live and work while they control robotic explorers on the surface of Mars."

Ever since they first peered into the night skies, humans have been awed and intrigued by Mars' baleful red glare. Ancient civilizations bestowed on the planet the name of their god of war. It was named Ares by the Greeks, Mars by the Romans. When the first telescopes revealed that the planets were neither specks of light nor gods but worlds, perhaps like earth, the notion grew that Mars might harbor life. Noting variations between the bright and dark areas of the planet, British Astronomer Sir William Herschel in 1784 attributed them to "clouds and vapors" and concluded that Mars had an atmosphere and that "its inhabitants probably enjoy a situation in many respects similar to our own."

German Mathematician Karl Gauss assumed that those inhabitants were intelligent. In 1820 he proposed growing a huge wheat field in Siberia in the form of a right triangle, surrounded by pine trees, that could be seen from afar. That would demonstrate to the Martians, Gauss figured, that earthlings not only existed but understood mathematics.

But was there any real evidence that Martians existed? After peering through his telescope in 1877, Italian Astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli (an uncle of the celebrated Paris couturiere) reported that he had charted several dozen canali linking dark areas on the surface of Mars. These canali, the astronomer wrote, "present an indescribable simplicity and symmetry that cannot possibly be the work of chance."

No one was more excited by this revelation than a wealthy American mathematician, diplomat and astronomer, Percival Lowell of Boston, who established an observatory in Arizona and dedicated it to the study of Mars. By 1908, influenced in part by optical illusions and wishful thinking, Lowell had counted and named hundreds of canals, which he believed were part of a large network conveying water from the polar ice caps to the parched cities of an arid and dying planet. Lowell's observations and musings, in turn, inspired British novelist H.G. Wells to write The War of the Worlds, a dramatic account of an invasion of the earth by octopus-like Martians. In 1938 a radio adaptation of that novel by another man named Welles -- Orson, that is -- panicked many Americans who believed that a real Martian invasion was under way.

Even after the mighty 200-in. Mount Palomar telescope revealed no evidence at all of networks of straight lines or other manifestations of intelligent life on Mars, the fascination continued. Fredric Brown's novel Martians, Go Home, Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, Robert Heinlein's novel Stranger in a Strange Land, and the popular Buck Rogers comic strip all involved encounters with Martians of various sizes, shapes and consistencies.

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