Mars: a world for exploration (1959)

In 1929, Clyde Tombaugh (top image above) joined the staff of Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, to hunt for Planet X, a world which Boston businessman Percival Lowell had predicted should exist beyond Neptune. On February 18, 1930, Tombaugh found Pluto.Although Pluto became Lowell Observatory's most famous discovery, Percival Lowell had founded his observatory in 1894 to find proof of intelligent life on Mars. He had theorized that the planet was slowly losing its water, and that the dark lines some astronomers glimpsed on its ochre disk were canals its inhabitants had excavated to distribute meltwater from the polar ice caps and stave off encroaching deserts. Lowell had believed that spots strung like beads along the lines were oases, and that irregular dark-colored areas (maria) scattered over the surface were desiccated sea beds (bottom image above). Though rejected by most astronomers, Lowell's romantic vision helped to inspire H. G. Wells's novel The War of the Worlds (1898) and the "Barsoom" books of Edgar Rice Burroughs. These tales in turn inspired generations of rocketeers and skywatchers. In the January 1959 issue of Astronautics, the journal of the American Rocket Society, Tombaugh summarized the prevailing view of Mars's surface conditions on the ...