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The 10 Best Mars Images Ever
By Robert Roy Britt
Senior Science Writer
posted: 07:00 am ET
03 December 2002
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Few pictures in the collective human eye have undergone such frequent and dramatic alteration as our view of Mars. From a map of canals built by an intelligent civilization to the high-tech 3-D and infrared images of today, Mars has been utterly transformed right in front of our eyes in just a few generations. The summer of 2003 will present a unique opportunity to view and photograph Mars. It will be closer to Earth than since many millennia before photography was invented. Amateurs will turn moderate-sized telescopes toward the ruddy point of light in hopes of discerning features -- the north polar cap, storm clouds, or perhaps even dark surface markings. Mars has already been photographed in great detail, of course. Scientists say some parts of Mars are better mapped than some parts of Earth. And the range of image types -- from visible light to infrared to computer-generated -- is bewildering. So SPACE.com enlisted some prominent Mars scientists to help select the 10 Best Mars Images Ever. This is an impossible list to create to anyone's satisfaction. You might have a favorite that didn't make the cut. Please don't blame the scientists; even some of their excellent choices didn't survive the winnowing process, and they didn't make all the picks. The result is a striking variety of images, each of which changed the way humans looked at Mars or represented a crucial moment in the history of our quest to understand the Red Planet. Little Green Men In late 1877, Mars was very close to Earth. though not as close as it will be in August, 2003. Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli took advantage of the relative proximity and set about to map the planet, peering at it through an 8.75-inch (0.2-meters) telescope that was a big improvement over what other famous astronomers had available before him. The colorblind Schiaparelli was said to have sharp eyesight. What he saw was a network of dark, narrow lines that dominated earthlings' view of Mars for many decades to come. 
Click to enlarge | He labeled the crisscrossing lines "canali" -- Italian for "channels." The term was translated into English as "canals." And you know what happened next. Perhaps no misconception in the history of science fueled more genuine research and simultaneous abject fear. The myth persisted into and beyond 1938, when a nation became terrorized by the apparent landing of Martians, as "reported" by Orson Welles in his War of the Worlds radio broadcast. At the time, many scientists were in fact looking in earnest for other signs of intelligent creatures on Mars, whom they expected would be busily constructing more irrigation ditches to quench the thirst of their dying masses. Next Page: The First Footprint
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