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observation
17 milestones, in chronological order.
- c. 1473 BCEAncient Eyes
Egypt leaves Mars an empty boat
On the painted ceiling of Senenmut's tomb at Thebes, four planets ride their sacred boats and a fifth boat sails empty. The empty one is probably Mars.
- c. 652 – 60 BCEAncient Eyes
Babylon turns Mars into arithmetic
Babylonian scribes logged Mars beside barley prices for six centuries, then used a 79-year repeat to predict where it would be — with no model of why.
- c. 168 BCEAncient Eyes
The Fire Star that Chinese astronomers could not pin down
A silk manuscript buried at Mawangdui gives working cycles for Jupiter, Saturn and Venus and none at all for Mars — the one planet that refused to keep a schedule.
- 877–1375 CEAncient Eyes
Islamic astronomers take the equant apart
Al-Battani re-measured every planetary motion, Ibn al-Haytham argued the equant was physically impossible, and Ibn al-Shatir built the models Copernicus would mirror.
- 23 May 1576The Telescope Era
Tycho Brahe builds Uraniborg and measures Mars by eye
Tycho fixed Mars to about an arcminute with sighting instruments alone, cross-checking with duplicate observers and correcting for refraction — and the logbooks went to Kepler.
- 1609The Telescope Era
Eight arcminutes of Mars break the perfect circle
A stubborn eight-arcminute gap between Tycho's Mars positions and every possible circular orbit forced Kepler to the ellipse, and rebuilt astronomy around it.
- 28 November 1659The Telescope Era
Huygens draws a spot on Mars and clocks the day
Huygens sketched a dark triangle on Mars, watched it come back night after night, and concluded a Martian day runs about 24 hours. He was 37 minutes out.
- 1672The Telescope Era
Mars gives up the size of the solar system
Observing the same Mars opposition from Paris and Cayenne gave the first sound distance to the Sun: about 140 million km, seven per cent short of the true value.
- 1784The Telescope Era
Herschel gives Mars seasons, and inhabitants
Herschel put the tilt of Mars near 29 degrees, read the shrinking polar caps as seasons, and concluded its inhabitants probably lived much as we do.
- 1840The Telescope Era
The first real map of Mars, and a zero meridian
Ten years of watching through a 95 mm refractor in a Berlin garden produced the first true map of another planet — and a prime meridian Mars still uses.
- August 1877Canals and Dreamers
Asaph Hall finds two moons in six nights
Mars came within 56 million kilometres in 1877. Hall had nearly given up the search when, six nights apart, he caught Deimos and then Phobos.
- September 1877Canals and Dreamers
Schiaparelli draws the canali
Schiaparelli mapped Mars through the 1877 opposition and crossed it with fine dark lines he called canali — channels. English made them canals, and the word did the rest.
- 1894Canals and Dreamers
Lowell builds an observatory to prove Mars is alive
A wealthy Bostonian put a telescope on a 7,200-foot ridge in Arizona to map a Martian irrigation network. The work was meticulous and entirely wrong.
- 20 September 1909Canals and Dreamers
Antoniadi dissolves the canals at Meudon
Four nights before opposition, the 83-centimetre Meudon refractor showed Antoniadi a Mars crowded with irregular detail and not one straight line.
- 1947Canals and Dreamers
Kuiper finds carbon dioxide, and no water
A lead-sulphide cell on the 82-inch at McDonald Observatory found the first molecule ever confirmed in the air of Mars: carbon dioxide. Water vapour stayed hidden until 1963.
- 25 July 1976First Contact
A mesa in Cydonia looks like a face
Viking 1 orbiter frame 35A72 caught a mesa a kilometre and a half across under a low sun. The shadows read as eyes, nose and mouth, and the argument ran for 25 years.
- 10 March 2006The Rover Decades
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter becomes the eye and the relay
The sharpest camera ever sent to another planet resolves 30 centimetres per pixel from 300 km up, and the same spacecraft relays much of what the rovers below it send home.