Close-up looks at the planet would prove it to be arid, though some scientists think liquid water once flowed on the planet billions of years ago. The idea of Martian oceans would persist throughout the 1800s. He got some things right, or at least close, including an axial tilt of 30 degrees (the actual number is 25.19).īut Herschel did make the mistake of assuming that the dark areas he saw on Mars were oceans, broken up by lighter regions representing land. In 1784, astronomer Sir William Herschel published a paper on his telescope observations of Mars. Less fanciful than the idea of canals on Mars, but still ultimately proven untrue, was the idea that Mars boasts oceans. This quiz will reveal how much you really know about some of the goofiest claims about the red planet. No planet is more steeped in myth and misconception than Mars. ![]() It turns out no such features exist, and the canals are now known to be nothing but an optical illusion. The first close-up pictures of Mars in 1965, taken by the spacecraft Mariner 4, put the canal theories to bed. His drawings of the canals and his three books on the planet published between 18 spread the idea that intelligent life had built the canals in a desperate attempt to draw water from Mars' polar ice caps. Could these features be evidence of irrigation and civilized life?Īmerican businessman Percival Lowell certainly thought so. In 1877, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli observed what he called "canali," or canals, on the Martian surface. Long before the Face on Mars mystified the public, planet-gazers were convinced that strange features dotted the surface of the Red Planet. In high resolution, the Face on Mars turns out to be an ordinary butte. The face got one more blow in 2001, when the same spacecraft snapped yet more photographs. This time, the mesa looked decidedly less human. ![]() In 1998, NASA's Mars Global Surveyor flew over the face and snapped the first sharp images of the landform since the Viking missions. It even showed up in a 1993 episode of television show "The X-Files" (episode: "Space"). Conspiracy theorists figured the face was evidence of life on Mars. Scientists shrugged the images of the " Face on Mars" off as a trick of light and shadow, but the public went mad.
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