SCIENCE FRIDAY ON MARS

MARS MISSONS



Mars has long been a subject of astronomical observations. The planet's easy visibility and distinctive reddish hue made Mars easy to track, even with the naked eye. The Babylonians tracked it reguarly, and called it "Negral," after their war god. The early Greeks knew it as the "star of Ares." But the Roman name, Mars, eventually was the one that stuck.

Tycho Brahe, a Danish astronomer, kept extremely detailed records of the planet's movements in the 1580's. His work was continued after his death by his German assistant, Johannes Kepler

Galileo made the first telescopic observations of it in 1610. Other early study of Mars revealed the inclination of Mars' axis, the fact that it rotated, the ice caps at its poles, and its thin atmosphere and changing seasons. In 1877 an American, Asaph Hall, discovered Mars' two sattelites -- Phobos (fear) and Deimos (terror.)

That same year, Giovanni Schiaparelli made a discovery that would sharply -- if mistakenly -- change the public's conception of Mars. Gazing through a telescope, Schiaparelli saw dark lines, that he called "channels." But when the word was translated out of Schiaparelli's native Italian, it was rendered as "canals," leading many to belive that intelligent life forms existed on our neighbor planet, and that they had advanced systems of agriculture.

If the Mars Pathfinder mission goes as planned, it will be the first time in 20 years that a probe has successfully landed on the surface of the Red Planet. Since the 1960's, many voyages to Mars have been attempted. Some have been successful. More have not.