Close Approach of Mars to Earth

In September 1956, as Mars approached its closest to Earth for 34 years, John Alldridge summed up what we then knew (or thought we knew) of the planet for the Manchester Evening News – Jerry F

Seen through the eye of a giant telescope — like that on the Pic du Midi, with its 24-inch lens capable of 900 magnifications — it looks like a great red-ochre disc, patched and streaked with tracts of greenish blue and capped with blisters of brilliant white.

This is Mars, the brightest star in the sky, glowing just now like a blazing ruby.

Tomorrow Mars will be closer to the Earth than it has been at any time since 1924. A mere 35,120,000 miles away.

And so tomorrow at vantage points on Earth huge telescopes will be trained on Mars. What they may see may yet help to answer the question that has vexed astronomers for centuries: “Is there intelligent life on Mars?”

For a planet so far away we know a great deal about Mars. We know, for instance, that it is tolerably warm, has atmosphere and moisture and vegetation of a sort. A flattish, arid, airless planet. But one not unlike our own Earth. Certainly not a dead planet. And one perfectly capable of sustaining an intelligent life of its own.

The first Earthmen arriving on Mars — as they may well do within the next 200 years — will find by Earth standards a small, lonely world, pleasantly warm by day but bitterly cold by night, with an atmosphere so thin that no human could exist there without an oxygen mask.

[Gravity] So thin, in fact, that a man who weighed 14 stone on Earth would weigh only five stone on Mars and go bounding about like a kangaroo.

We know now that the white discs around whichever pole is visible from Earth are really thin ice caps. During what passes for summer on Mars the ice appears to melt. And this melting snow and ice is probably the only true water supply the Martians — if they exist — could depend on.

It used to be thought the red-ochre areas — which, incidentally, account for Mars being called the Red Planet — were deserts and the dark blue-green patches sea.

Deserts there most certainly are. But not deserts as we understand them. For there is no sand on Mars. They could be deserts of volcanic ash, or dust coloured by a metallic salt like iron oxide, or even of brownish fine-grained felsite. But one thing seems certain. They must be cold, lonely, incredibly dismal places.

If the dark greenish-blue patches are not seas, what are they? Marsh probably. Or huge oases: fertile areas supporting a seasonal growth of something very like our own mosses and lichen.

But how do these so-called “fertile” areas remain fertile without a regular supply of water?

The great Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli may have found the answer to that one. Looking through his telescope one night in 1877 he was staggered to see what appeared to be a number of fine dark lines crossing the “deserts” and linking one “fertile” area with another.

These lines were unlike anything else ever observed in the planetary system. And because they looked so exactly like man-made canals he called them just that — “canali”.

And in doing so he touched off the great controversy that has raged furiously ever since — “Are there canals on Mars?” For obviously if they were indeed part of an artificial irrigation system then it seemed to prove conclusively that there must be life — and intelligent life of a very high order indeed — on Mars.

Now if Schiaparelli could have produced photographs of what he had seen that would have been the end of it. Unfortunately, it is only on rare moments that these canals — if they are canals — are visible at all. The slightest disturbance in the Earth’s atmosphere can blot them out. Which makes any attempt at time-exposure useless.

However, he found a tremendous champion in another astronomer, the American Professor Percival Lowell, of Flagstaff, Arizona. So satisfied was Professor Lowell that in 1908 he published a book “Mars and its Canals.” A book, illustrated by himself, which showed not a few isolated lines but a whole geometric network of canals: artificial channels of water, he insisted, constructed by intelligent beings engaged in a desperate struggle for existence in an arid world.

All very exciting and romantic. But although the Lowell theory is still staunchly upheld in some scientific circles a more modern school is inclined to dismiss it as an optical illusion.

According to Dr. Dollfus, who, through his giant telescope on the Pic du Midi, has Earth’s best view of Mars, what at first sight seem to be canals are really “roughly-aligned spots and patches, hardened and sharpened into more conventional ‘canals’ by the slightest atmospheric tremor.”

If they are not canals, what are they? Most likely long, shallow valleys darkened by vegetation during the Martian spring, hints another expert, Dr. Patrick Moore.

But even if you dismiss the canal theory there are still one or two things that need a good deal of explaining.

There is, for instance, the very odd behaviour of Mars’s two satellites, Deimos and Phobos.

These two tiny planets-without-a-planet were first observed by Professor Asaph Hall, of Washington, in that same fateful year, 1877. They are very small indeed. Phobos is only 10 miles across and both would fit nicely inside the Isle of Man.

Phobos is the odder of the two. Although it revolves round Mars in the same direction as Mars revolves round the sun, it would appear to a Martian to rise in the west and set in the east only four and a quarter hours later.

Then there was that mysterious explosion witnessed by Japanese observers in December, 1951. They detected a “small, starlike spot” over the area known as Tithonius Lacus, near Mars’s south Pole.

“During the next few minutes it decreased in brilliancy and became larger, finally fading out in less than an hour.”

What was it? The Martians signalling to Earth with mirrors? An atomic bomb explosion? “Nonsense!” say the scientists. Nonsense or not, it happened…

It looks as if the right answer won’t be available until space-bound explorers land on Mars and find out for themselves. And when will that be? Certainly not much before the year 2100, say the scientists.

And before he gets to Mars man will have to find his way to the moon first. Even then the trip will take nine months.

Sit down, we’ve got long wait…

At the end of the article, Uncle John reproduced a letter from 1902 which expressed the view that the then-impending Coronation offered an interesting opportunity for Mars-Earth relations.

Click here for a closer look at Miss Williams’ letter.

Reproduced with permission
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Jerry F 2024