Life on Mars Mars (Greek: Ares), our fourth planet in the Solar system, is named after the ancient roman god of war, Mars. People also called it the “Red Planet” as its surface if covered by iron oxide (loose dust and rock) which gives it a red bright rust colour surface appearance. During the Solar System's formation, Mars was created out of the protoplanetary disk. Also, Mars has two moons: Phobos and
Deimos. Mars’ size is relatively smaller than our Earth and approximately half the size of the Earth; therefore, it takes longer to orbits the Sun
(about two Earth years). Mars also has a surface area about the same as the land surface area of Earth. The Earth is about nine times more massive than
Mars. Truly, there are some similarities between Mars and Earth which kept our interest to discover this mystery planet over decades. For example,
Mars have a relatively thin atmosphere similar to Earth’s. Its atmosphere contains oxygen, carbon dioxide, nitrogen and argon, but proportionally different to our Earth. Moreover, it has similar observable features like volcanoes, valleys, deserts and polar ice caps. Mars’ seasonal cycles are likewise similar to those of Earth as well. These integrated features give rise to our suspect about the past or existing presence of life and many more questions related to its history. As Mars is the neighbour of Earth, its history of ideas about the presence of life has been a controversy issue over decades. Therefore, the research on Mars has never been stopped.
William Herschel (1738-1822) and his sister Caroline first noticed the polar caps of Mars when they looked at the planet between 1777 to 1784.
Later, as the use of telescope became more popular during that time, people started to record and make drawing of what they observed. The idea about life on Mars was rose by Percival Lowell (1855-1916) in the early 20 th century and the first spacecraft to visit Mars was Mariner in 1965. More recently, the Mars Phoenix mission had succeeded in its investigations from
2007 to 2010. Phoenix has four main goals in this research: determining whether life every arose on Mars, characterise the climate and geology of
Mars, and prepare for human exploration. It has proven the water existence on Mars but still failed to prove evidence of life on this Red Planet. As the centuries unfold, millions of artists will live on the moon and paint the moon and Mars as we go out into the universe. (Alan Bean, Former NASA
Astronaut; b. 1932 - ) Although proving evidence of life on Mars is still an ongoing issue, there have been great achievements on discovery and researching Mars since Percival Lowell who was the first person who brought up this idea in early 20 th century. Percival Lowell was a wealthy businessman who was not a professional astronomer. However, his curiosity about Mars started after reading Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835-1910)’s popular accounts such as the book, “Life on Mars” which talks about the canali (Italian word for “channels”) 1 Ann-Marie Kan (z3333826) PHYS1160 that he observed in 1877. However, the mistranslation of the term into
“canal” gives rise to various assumptions during that time. In 1893,
Percival Lowell picked up the work of Schiaparelli and started his full-time astronomy career to study these canals on Mars in his observatory. He drew detailed maps of Martian canals and published books on his discovery. For the next fifteen years, he gave lectures to popularize his ideas and published three books about his views on Mars: Mars (1895),
Mars and Its Canals (1906), and Mars As the Abode of Life (1908). (Sources from Wikipedia) During that time, Lowell was keen on proving the artificial-canal hypotheses. According to his work, he drew detailed maps and descriptions about the Martian surface markings which he termed
“non-natural features”, the accounts of canals and the dark spots. He also postulates that Mars was a dying desert world whose inhabitants built a planet wide irrigation system of canals to combat the drying up of their planet. He claimed that these canals transported precious water from the polar icecaps to the warmer equatorial regions where the purported Martians lived. (Heckert, P.A., 2008) Although this idea excited the public and became a full-blown controversy in the last 1800’s, the astronomical community was skeptical. They believed that there was a problem on his work. Other professional astronomers used larger telescopes and even using the world’s largest telescope at that time to observed Mars, but they had failed to see any markings as Lowell described. Consequently, the astronomical community did not take his ideas seriously and ostracized him and his observatory. Although the consensus was that some features of
Lowell’s observations did exists and cannot be disproved (Kidger, 2005),
Spectroscopic analysis of Mars' atmosphere began in earnest in 1894. It was begun with a United States astronomer; William Wallace Campbell. He demonstrated that water and oxygen were never present in the Mars atmosphere. (Cambers, 1999) Moreover, by 1909 better telescopes was developed. The sixty-inch Mount Wilson Observatory telescope in Southern
California allowed closer observation of the structures of Mars which
Lowell had interpreted as “canals”, and revealed irregular geological features, assuming that was the result of prominent natural erosion features. (Guthke, 1990) However, these discoveries still did not entirely disprove the existence of “canals”. This issue remained controversy for half a century, until Mariner 4, the first spacecraft to visit Mars and took the first close-up pictures of the Mars surface in 1965 finally settled this controversy. They show no sign of canals or Martian civilisation. After that, Mariner 9 orbited on Mars in 1971 and Viking mission first landed on Mars, and this further showed us that the surface markings and straight line features taken to be canals are regarded as an optical illusion. (Baxter, 2005) On the other words, Lowell visually perceived images of markings on Mars surfaces that differ from the actual image in reality, representing his dream and what he wanted to believe. 2
Ann-Marie Kan (z3333826) PHYS1160 Percival Lowell’s work tended to appeal to more imagination than hard science. One of the reasons of his failure would be his unprofessional skills in this field. However, his intense interest in astronomy and mathematics had leaded him to make contributions to astronomical spectroscopy. Having the financial resources, he provided the Lowell Observatory with highest class equipment for spectroscopic investigations of the heavenly bodies, with the support by Dr. Slipher.
(Nature, 1916) Notably, Lowell’s work had an influence in astronomy industry although his work was been disproved. It was his curiosity and fascination about evidence of life on Mars that urged the other scientists to research on Mars and tried to confirm his ideas. Because of his dreams and his imaginations that gave public’s attention on his views, forcing astronomy industry to make improvement and contributions to put research effort on Mars studies. In this 21 st century, the discovery on Mars was also impacted by Lowell’s ideas. Recently, the Phoenix Mars Mission, which is operated by NASA, has been seeking to verify Lowell’s imagination about the presence of water and habitability potential in the Martian arctic.
Phoenix had successfully launched in August 2007 and arrived in the Martian
North Polar Region and began primary operations in 2008. In the same year
31 st July, Mars Phoenix lander directly sampled water ice and has confirmed the existence of water ice on Mars. This is a great discovery in the century and answered Lowell’s question about the presence of water in
Mars. Other achievements by Phoenix include the new evidence of volcanic activity persisted on Mars and the precise measurement of carbon and oxygen isotopes in the Martian atmosphere. These findings imply that Mars has relatively recently replenished its atmospheric carbon dioxide, reacted with water in the surface. (The Science Mission Directorate’s Input to The
President’s Space and Aeronautics Report, 2010) With the Phoenix’s mission now ending, the remained unanswered questions on the evidence of life and the demise of liquid water on Martian surface problems will become major research areas for future missions. In essence, Percival Lowell’s work does have contributions to the space mission which also lead up to the results of Mars Phoenix Mission. Today, the question about presence of life on Mars is still exists and remains unknown. There is no conclusive evidence that life currently or ever existed on Mars. Nevertheless, we can evidence the development of the history of ideas about life on Mars beginning with
Percival Lowell’s account of canals on Mars and until now. He made greatest contributions to the advancement of astrophysics and other scientist and missions also generated new ideas about Mars. There is a lot more challenges for astronomers to further discover new things on Mars, especially the evidence of life and its future evolution positions.
Understanding the history and the structure of Mars is crucial for future space exploration such as plans for “terraforming” Mars.