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Indigenous: Canals of Mars

Since the 19th century, Mars has been considered the most hospitable place in the solar system beyond Earth for life and human exploration. In the past, Martian canals and seasonal changes led some to believe Mars supported life. While those theories were later disproven, scientific and public interest in the possibility of Martian life has remained. Mars also plays a central role in popular culture through fiction and media portrayals of Mars invasions. To this day, Mars continues to stimulate scientific inquiry and human imagination.

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Ezzie Doro
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50 views

Indigenous: Canals of Mars

Since the 19th century, Mars has been considered the most hospitable place in the solar system beyond Earth for life and human exploration. In the past, Martian canals and seasonal changes led some to believe Mars supported life. While those theories were later disproven, scientific and public interest in the possibility of Martian life has remained. Mars also plays a central role in popular culture through fiction and media portrayals of Mars invasions. To this day, Mars continues to stimulate scientific inquiry and human imagination.

Uploaded by

Ezzie Doro
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Since at least the end of the 19th century, Mars has been considered

the most hospitable place in the solar system beyond Earth both
for indigenous life and for human exploration and habitation. At that
time, speculation was rife that the so-called canals of Mars—complex
systems of long, straight surface lines that very few astronomers had
claimed to see in telescopic observations—were the creations of
intelligent beings. Seasonal changes in the planet’s appearance,
attributed to the spread and retreat of vegetation, added further to the
purported evidence for biological activity. Although the canals later
proved to be illusory and the seasonal changes geologic rather than
biological, scientific and public interest in the possibility of Martian
life and in exploration of the planet has not faded.

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During the past century Mars has taken on a special place in


popular culture. It has served as inspiration for generations of fiction
writers from H.G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs in the heyday of
the Martian canals to Ray Bradbury in the 1950s and Kim Stanley
Robinson in the ’90s. Mars has also been a central theme in radio,
television, and film, perhaps the most notorious case being Orson
Welles’s radio-play production of H.G. Wells’s novel War of the
Worlds, which convinced thousands of unwitting listeners on the
evening of October 30, 1938, that beings from Mars were invading
Earth. The planet’s mystique and many real mysteries remain a
stimulus to both scientific inquiry and human imagination to this day.
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Basic astronomical data


View of Mars created with data from Viking and the Mars Orbiter Laser
Altimeter (MOLAi) aboard the Mars Global Surveyor

View of Mars created with data from Viking and the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLAi)
aboard the Mars Global Surveyor.

NASA/GSFC/Scientific Visualization StudioSee all videos for this article


Learn about the revolution of Mars in relation to Earth

Learn how long a year is on Mars.

JPL/NASASee all videos for this article

Mars is the fourth planet out from the Sun. It moves around the Sun at


a mean distance of 228 million km (140 million miles), or about 1.5
times the distance of Earth from the Sun. Because of Mars’s relatively
elongated orbit, the distance between Mars and the Sun varies from
206.6 million to 249.2 million km (128.4 million to 154.8 million
miles). Mars orbits the Sun once in 687 Earth days, which means that
its year is nearly twice as long as Earth’s. At its closest approach, Mars
is less than 56 million km (35 million miles) from Earth, but it recedes
to almost 400 million km (250 million miles) when the two planets are
on opposite sides of the solar system.

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