Looking up into the dark night skies, ancient civilisations saw a burning red star that followed its own strange line across the sky. It filled them with dread and awe. As early as 400 BC the Babylonians were keen astronomers, able to predict eclipses. To them Mars was Nergal – a god of war and [...]

Feeds Editorials Times Online

The Sundaytimes Sri Lanka

Mars, God of War

Discovering the Red Planet - Part 1 | As the Curiosity rover continues to hunt for evidence of life on Mars, we launch our own exploration here at the Funday Times. Join us for a new series as we meet the men and women who first tracked the progress of the Red Planet across the night sky; we trace the journeys of the first rovers to photograph its surface, catch up on Curiosity’s adventures and finally look forward to a time where the first astronaut will walk on the surface of this alien world. In the process, we hope to understand not only what Mars is like, but what the future holds for Earth.
View(s):

Looking up into the dark night skies, ancient civilisations saw a burning red star that followed its own strange line across the sky. It filled them with dread and awe. As early as 400 BC the Babylonians were keen astronomers, able to predict eclipses.
To them Mars was Nergal – a god of war and pestilence who presided over the netherworld. Later, the Egyptians dubbed the planet HarDecher – the Red One. Greeks called it Ares after their god of war, but it was the Romans who bestowed the name Mars on the red planet.

As the years went by and technology improved, astronomers came ever closer to understanding the mysteries of the planet. Galileo Galilei (1564 – 1642) became the first person to observe Mars through a telescope and later in 1659, the Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens

(1629 – 1695) actually drew Mars using an advanced telescope of his own design. He noticed a large, dark spot, (possibly Syrtis Major, a volcano on the surface of Mars) which returned to the same position at the same time the next day. He used this to calculate Mars’ rotation.

Huygens was also the first to notice a white spot at the South Pole – the southern polar cap.In 1698, he was also the first to ask the question we still don’t have a definitive answer to – was there life on Mars?

If you asked Sir William Herschel (1738 – 1822), the British Astronomer Royal, he would have said all the planets were likely to support intelligent beings. Having deducted that Mars had a thin atmosphere, he believed that Martian beings ‘probably enjoy a situation similar to our own.’

In 1877, Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli (1835 – 1910) threw fuel into the fire when he announced that he had seen ‘canali’ on Mars – an earth-like canal system that had been built by an alien civilisation!

These didn’t actually exist – disappointingly what Schiaparelli was reporting were optical illusions.
To Asaph Hall goes the credit of discovering the moons of Mars: he named them Phobos (fear) and Deimos (fright), after the horses of the Greek war god, Ares (counterpart to the Roman war god, Mars) and in 1867, Richard Anthony Proctor published a map of Mars with continents and oceans. His choice of zero meridian remains widely accepted.

Coming up: The Age of the Space Probe




Share This Post

DeliciousDiggGoogleStumbleuponRedditTechnoratiYahooBloggerMyspace
comments powered by Disqus

Advertising Rates

Please contact the advertising office on 011 - 2479521 for the advertising rates.