Observing Mars With Webcams Options

[Guest_Myran_*]

I remember the time clearly, and prior to the Mariners the best images as those shown in National Geographic did not show enough detail to make any conclusion about the surface of Mars.
So you are absoluterly correct in your reply Bob Shaw.

The idea of canals was however less fashionable by the time prior to the Mariners since many new visual observers had published reports they could not find any, so the idea of a 'dying race' on the planet was quite far from mainstream.
Many thought that the changing colour seen on the surface was sign of some kind of simple vegetation such as lichens, and since the atmospheric pressure was thought to be many times higher, perhaps even 100 mB there were some speculation about animal life such as insects also. But canals? No I got the impression back then that a majority of astronomers / scientists didnt believe in any at that time.

[ljk4-1]

I remember the time clearly, and prior to the Mariners the best images as those shown in National Geographic did not show enough detail to make any conclusion about the surface of Mars.
So you are absoluterly correct in your reply Bob Shaw.

The idea of canals was however less fashionable by the time prior to the Mariners since many new visual observers had published reports they could not find any, so the idea of a 'dying race' on the planet was quite far from mainstream.
Many thought that the changing colour seen on the surface was sign of some kind of simple vegetation such as lichens, and since the atmospheric pressure was thought to be many times higher, perhaps even 100 mB there were some speculation about animal life such as insects also. But canals? No I got the impression back then that a majority of astronomers / scientists didnt believe in any at that time.

Though if you find a copy of the December, 1967 issue of National Geographic Magazine, the article on Mars discusses the idea that the canals may be natural features and showed an example of straight lines made by natural causes on Earth.

And when Mariner 4 took its 22 images of the Red Planet in 1965, there was discussion about the two straight lines faintly seen in famous Image 11 crossing the large crater that later was given Mariner's name.

So canals were still being debated even in the late 1960s, though certainly nothing like even a few decades earlier.

If only the early Mariners had imaged the volcanoes and canyons, we probably would have had humans on Mars by now.

[Guest_Myran_*]

ljk4-1 said: Though if you find a copy of the December, 1967 issue of National Geographic Magazine, the article on Mars discusses the idea that the canals may be natural features and showed an example of straight lines made by natural causes on Earth.
.....So canals were still being debated even in the late 1960s.

Yes you are correct there, when reading National Geographic which I did view that discussion as a kind of compromise effort to please readers of the two camps.

Personally I kept an open mind but thought that some of the lines very well might be for real being rays from impacts like Tycho that had spread dark material on the surface in raylike patterns. (Most likely proposed in some magazine I did read at the time but no longer remember) If that had been correct they would not have been 'canals' of course.
At the same time as being cautious about the idea of any lines I as so many others certainly was on the bandwaggon of believing in plant life, a fact that only show how badly misleading hopes and wishes can be.

[glennwsmith]

MichaelT and your colleagues in Germany:

Great work!

Glenn

[edstrick]

The Mariner 6 and 7 approach images in the summer of '69 essentially put the nail in the canals coffin. The narrow angle images were taken through a yellow filter and should have had perfectly decent sensativity to features "seen" at several times lower resolution to AT-BEST comparable resolution from Earth, and with few exceptions, like a stubby dark line in Coprates (part of Valles Marineris), the canals just weren't there.

One thing that gets constantly repeated is the false "factoid" that the 1969 Mariners showed nothing but the same cratered dirtball that Mariner 4 showed. Though sun angles were high and images were noisy, Mariner 6 discovered the chaos regions at the east end of Valles Marineris and these were widely and accurately interpreted as collapse features, possibly involving permafrost or vulcanism. Mariner 7 discovered complex features of unknown origin in the south polar cap, attributed to unknown polar processes, and caught the first glimpse of the polar layered terrain of the permant south polar cap. And Mariner 7 also observed rough terrain on the west rim of the Hellsa basin, a series of ridges inside the basin rim, and "featureless terrain" on the basin floor (probably concealed by dust haze), which the spectrometers correctly identified as sharply lower than the plateau of the southern cratered highlands outside the basin. They couldn't identify it as an impact basin, but they did identify it as an area lacking the high crater populations of the cratered terrain and thus younger (which the floor of Hellas is)

It was clear in 1969 that Mars had non-moon-like terrains, all involving younger surface processes than the cratered terrain so abunduntaly imaged represented, and it was clear that future missions were needed to make a complete picture and see how the "extra" pieces fit the puzzle.

[ljk4-1]

Mars - Half the planet it used to be:

http://spaceweather.com/swpod2005/22dec05/warren1.jpg

I presume the dust storm that once threatened the rovers is gone as well? Or is Mars just too far away to see it clearly now?