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	Martian canals - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		The arrival of the space probe Mariner 4 in 1965, which took pictures revealing impact craters and a generally barren landscape, was the final nail in the coffin of the idea that Mars could be inhabited by higher forms of life.
		The first person to use the word canale in connection with Mars was Angelo Secchi in 1858, although he did not see any straight lines and applied the term to large features —for example, he used the name "Atlantic Canale" for what later came to be called Syrtis Major.
		Even after canals were largely discredited, Martian civilization remained a theme for science fiction such as the Barsoom of Edgar Rice Burroughs (see Mars in fiction).
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Martian_canal (1114 words)

	Mars in fiction - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Stapledon's Martians - sentient cloudlets composed of countless microscopic particles and capable of drifting across interplanetary space - are completely different from Wells', yet the book shows his influence and follows the general scheme of a drying and dying Mars and of Martians seeking the warmer and wetter Earth.
		At the end of the book it is disclosed that the Martians' ancestors had possessed the technology to build spaceships and invade Earth, but the righteous Martians voluntarily renounced that possibility and stoically resigned themseveles to eventually dying out with their drying and cooling native planet.
		The story is deliberately written as an elegiac farewell to the old conception of Mars, complete with canals and an ancient, dying Martian race, as "The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth" (1965) was his farewell to the Venus of earlier science fiction.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Mars_in_fiction (5018 words)

	Mars - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		The surface of Mars is thought to be primarily composed of basalt, based upon the Martian meteorite collection and orbital observations.
		The dichotomy of Martian topography is striking: northern plains flattened by lava flows contrast with the southern highlands, pitted and cratered by ancient impacts.
		Martian dust devils are known to be passing over the Rovers, cleaning their solar panels, and thus extending their lifespan.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Mars (3816 words)

	MARS by Percival Lowell. Chapter IV. Canals (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-13)
		For the canals to come out in all their fineness and geometrical precision, the air must be steady enough to show the markings on the planet's disk with the clear-cut character of a steel engraving.
		Of the 116 canals not down on Schiaparelli's map, 44 are canals in the dark regions and 72 canals in the light ones.
		At times the canals are invisible, and this invisibility is real, not apparent; that is, it is not an invisibility due to distance or obscuration of any kind between us and them, but an actual invisibility due to the condition of the canal itself.
	www.wanderer.org /references/lowell/Mars/chap04.html (9173 words)

	Canals on Mars
		And if the canals were filmed by that first probe, it is a certainty that they were filmed by later Mariner and Viking probes, yet that information has always been withheld.
		The canals did not meander at all like a river would; they followed great circle courses, which are the shortest distance between two points on a globe.
		One canal was found to run straight as an arrow for 1,500 miles, something that no natural water channel could do.
	www.goddardmultimedia.fsnet.co.uk /atpai/canals.htm (564 words)

	Mars, canals
		He drew increasingly elaborate maps in which the canals became a more and more prominent feature, even seeming to double on a seasonal basis ("gemination" of canals).
		Many people felt the haunting, other-worldy allure of the Martian canals and novelists were not slow to weave romantic tales around the theme, further stimulating public interest.
		By the dawn of the twentieth century, it was becoming clear that the Martian atmosphere was too thin (see Mars, atmosphere), the temperature too low, and water too sparse (see Mars, water), to support any kind of life except possibly primitive vegetation (see Mars, vegetation on) and microbes.
	www.daviddarling.info /encyclopedia/M/Marscanals.html (938 words)

	Mars, by Percival Lowell
		The canals, indeed, began at the same time to darken; but, highly important as this was for other reasons, the whole area of their fine lines and associated patches did not begin to make up for what the dark regions lost.
		They are not, therefore, mere enlargements of the canals, due to natural causes; for were the spots enlargements of the canals at their crossing points they should be more or less star-shaped, or concave to the canals, whereas they are round, or roundish rectangles,--that is convex to the same.
		No one who has seen the canals well--and the well is all-important for bringing out the characteristics that give the stamp of artificiality, the straightness and fineness of the lines--would ever have any doubt as to their seeming artificial, however he might choose to blind himself to the consequences.
	www.sacred-texts.com /ufo/mars/plmars.htm (22347 words)

	Mars (planet) Study @ LaunchBase.net (Launch Base) (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-13)
		The belief that there may be life on Mars was popularized in the 19th century, mainly due to the announcement of Martian canals from the observations by Percival Lowell and Giovanni Schiaparelli.
		This was popularly mistranslated as 'canals', and the myth of the Martian canals began.
		They were apparently artificial linear features on the surface that were asserted to be canals, and together with the seasonal changes in the brightness of some areas, they were thought to be linked with vegetation growth.
	www.launchbase.net /encyclopedia/Mars_(planet) (3023 words)

	Schiaparelli, Giovanni Virginio (1835-1910)
		Prolific Italian astronomer whose research ranged widely but whose name is forever associated with Mars, and the controversy over the Martian "canals" which, unwittingly, he helped to unleash.
		He drew in more canals and for the first time reported what he called a "gemination," or doubling of one of these features.
		Cautious and unflambouyant though he was – in sharp contrast to Percival Lowell – Schiaparelli nevertheless seems to have been biased in his Martian studies by a underlying desire to prove the habitability (if not the actual habitation) of other worlds in the solar system.
	www.daviddarling.info /encyclopedia/S/Schiaparelli.html (1090 words)

	Chapter III: The Martian Canal System
		And for that reason, soon after the main canals were constructed, second and parallel waterways were made for the purpose of guaranteeing an uninterrupted flow of water from the Poles to the Equatorial regions.
		The water in the canals, in most instances, is distributed by gravity; but recourse is had to a lock system and to immense pumps for raising the water to proper levels.
		Where the canals cross depressions or old sea-bottoms, immense aqueducts have been constructed of solid stone and concrete in such a manner that the water, in most cases, flows to its destination by gravity.
	www.sacred-texts.com /ufo/mars/mah/mah06.htm (1084 words)

	The canals of Mars-historical note
		In steady air the canals are perfectly distinct lines, not unlike the Fraunhofer ones of the Spectrum, pencil lines or gossamer filaments acording to size.
		All the observers at Flagstaff concur in this.
		Every opposition has added to the assurance that the canals are artificial; both by disclosing their peculiarities better and better and by removing generic doubts as to the planet's habitability.
	ltpwww.gsfc.nasa.gov /tharsis/canals.html (775 words)

	ERBzine 1414: Matching Mars: Lost Canals of Percival Lowell by Den Valdron
		Canals, even fairly large ones had been built in the United States and Canada, France and England, so they were well known, but the new giant Panama and Suez canals were literally an order of magnitude greater, transforming continents.
		The canals, he concluded, were artificial structures created by the inhabitants of Mars in order to draw moisture from the poles, or from the remnants of the Martian seas.
		Quite possibly, such Martian folk are possessed of inventions of which we have not dreamed, and with them electrophones and kinetoscopes are things of a bygone past, preserved with veneration in museums as relics of the clumsy contrivances of the simple childhood of the race.
	www.erbzine.com /mag14/1414.html (2755 words)

	LowellCanals
		In some respects, the Martians, who built the canals, were in our image in that the canals provided pathways for the flowing of fluid, presumably water, to regions of Mars having need of an augmented water supply.
		The Martian wind on a global scale is estimated, on average, to have a velocity at night on flat terrain of 2 meters (m)/second (s).
		As for the famous or infamous double canals, I propose that those doubled canals were there when additional dust was in the area of a suitably sized group of craters.
	www.thespaceguy.com /lowellcanals.htm (3439 words)

	Martian meteorite: Facts and details from Encyclopedia Topic (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-13)
		A meteorite is a relatively small extra-terrestrial body that reaches the earths surface....
		The other two types of Martian meteorites are Chassignites and Nakhlites.
		Martian canals[For more facts and a topic of this subject, EHandler: no quick summary.
	www.absoluteastronomy.com /encyclopedia/m/ma/martian_meteorite.htm (1709 words)

	The Straight Dope: Whatever happened to the canals of Mars? (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-13)
		The controversy surrounding the Martian canals, probably the most famous episode in the history of astronomy, was not cleared up until the early 1970s, almost a century after it began.
		Some thought the canals were natural features, such as volcanic rift valleys, earthquake cracks, and so on; others doubted they existed at all.
		From this some concluded that the Martian canals were an optical illusion, the result of the psychological tendency to connect indistinct features into some sort of comprehensible whole.
	www.straightdope.com /classics/a2_102.html (750 words)

	ASP: The Face on Mars
		Lowell was convinced that intelligent Martians had built a network of canals to pump water from the melting ice caps to dying cities in the desert.
		Those who did see canals rarely agreed on their locations and intensities; some said they were broad, diffuse stripes, while others maintained they had a thin, spider-web appearance.
		Absolutely no canals were seen, and the volcanoes, valleys and craters that were mapped didn't correspond to any feature seen by Lowell.
	www.astrosociety.org /education/publications/tnl/25/25.html (1164 words)

	ERBzine 1438: Barsoom and Lowell's Mars y Leathem Mehaffey
		One might argue that there are so many canals on the map that it would be hard for this not to be the case.
		Their headquarters lay in the southwest corner of this district, near the crossing of two of the so-called Martian canals.” Examining the Lowell map shows Thark at the southwest corner of an area bounded on the east and west by broad canals (“large fertile tracts”?) numbers 178 (Scamander) and 219 (Xanthus) on Lowell’s map.
		Canals 166 (Leontes) and another (182?) cross in the gray area to the southwest of Thark.
	www.erbzine.com /mag14/1438.html (2495 words)

	H.G. Wells - Free Online Library
		The story appeared at a time when Schiaparell's discovery of Martian "canals" Percival Lowell's book Mars (1895) arose speculations that there could be life on the Red Planet.
		Martian cylinders land on earth outside London and the invaders, who have a "roundish bulk with tentacles," start to vaporize humans.
		However, Martians are slain "by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put on this earth." In 1930 Paramount offered the story to the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein, but he never attempted an adaptation.
	wells.thefreelibrary.com (1524 words)

	chapter 5
		The Martian meteorites escaped from the planet in explosions caused by collisions of asteroids or comets with the planet.
		The sole exception, the Martian meteorite ALH 84001[credit Lunar and Planetary Institute], is about 4.5 billion years old, or as old as Mars itself.
		But the investigators overlooked a curious feature of the Martian environment: With the dry surface exposed to very low atmospheric pressure and high winds, the Martian dust storms should generate an electrostatic phenomenon called "glow discharge" (the swirling dust will actually glow faintly in the dark).
	www.amnh.org /rose/mars/ch5text.html (1268 words)

	lowellreview
		Thus the Martians were derived from Lowell's Spencerisms and Lowell accepted the notion of our origin from a gaseous nebular mass.
		Once sighted, those canals were tenaciously supported by Lowell as the indisputable evidence for a civilization on Mars.
		The canals of Mars could have been dimly seen, in reddish hues, encased in translucent segments stretched into distant threads, taut as the thinly flowing water, humming at great velocity to substations and lowered by means of repeated gentle inclines into pools.
	www.thespaceguy.com /lowellreview.htm (1867 words)

	The Earthlings Are Coming! (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-13)
		Martians were probably using the canals to send water from the polar caps to the warmer areas around the equator of Mars, he said.
		Wallace said that canals on Mars "would be the work of madmen rather than intelligent beings." Still, the idea that Martians were building canals was more popular.
		Even though there were no big Martians in the pictures from the Mariner spacecraft, scientists were very curious to see if there were any teeny tiny Martian creatures living there.
	www.thursdaysclassroom.com /24aug00/article1.html (1667 words)

	Space Today Onlne - What We Know About Mars - Water
		Well, everybody knows canals are artificial waterways built by intelligent beings, so, as a result, science fiction authors found a new source of scary tales about little green men.
		The popular notion that Martian canals had been constructed by an heroic, intelligent race tapping melting polar ice for water to irrigate equatorial crops was argued persuasively by the famous astronomer Percival Lowell in his 1895 book.
		Relative to the rest of the Martian surface, the gullies seem to be extremely young.
	www.spacetoday.org /SolSys/Mars/MarsThePlanet/MarsWater.html (1089 words)

	On the Cosmic Horizon (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-13)
		In 1895, he published detailed maps of the canals, as well as a book expounding not only his belief that they were constructed by a Martian civilization but also his conclusions about the nature of that civilization.
		Because Lowell had correctly deduced that Mars was generally arid and had icy polar caps, he imagined that the canals were built to carry water from the poles to thirsty cities nearer the equator.
		The debate about Martian canals and cities was not entirely put to rest until NASA’s first two spacecraft to Mars — the Mariner 4 flyby in 1965 and the Mariner 9 orbiter in 1971 — sent back images of a barren, cratered surface.
	www.jeffreybennett.com /OCHSample2.htm (3913 words)

	Martian of the Week 08.15.03 (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-13)
		Percival was determined to find proof of intelligent life on Mars by Studying the Martian canals.
		Lowell thought the Martian canals were used to supply water from the melting polar caps to a dry dying planet.
		The canals turned out to be an illusion from the eyes stringing dark patches together into a line at the upper limits of resolution.
	www.whatonmars.com /archive/08-15-03mow.htm (299 words)

	Project Gallery - Texas Aerospace Scholars Program
		This was the age of canals, around the time when the Eerie canal and the Panama canal had been built.
		Martians, it was assumed, must be very intelligent and technologically advanced in order to have built these canals.
		Martian Chronicles depicted the colonization of Mars and the consequences for both earthlings and Martians.
	www.isset.org /nasa/tss/aerospacescholars.org/scholars/rachels.htm (1889 words)

	Martian Canals: Is Lowell Vindicated?
		Lowell may have gone too far in claiming that the canals of Mars were the labors of intelligent beings, but he definitely saw "something." Earthbound observers still see and photograph Martian canals, despite the acknowledged fact that Martian orbiters and landers saw nothing resembling canals.
		Yes, some of the canals that Lowell and others drew are still there -- not physically perhaps -- but possibly as anomalies of perception and/or camera/telescope aberrations.
		The Martian "canal" story is covered in detail in AMO1 in our catalog The Moon and the Planets and handbook Mysterious Universe.
	www.science-frontiers.com /sf057/sf057a05.htm (261 words)

	The Planet Mars: A History of Observation and Discovery. Chapter 10: The Lingering Romance. University of Arizona Press.
		Partly because of the heated, seemingly endless, and finally inconclusive controversies about the Martian canals, and partly because of the rise of astrophysics in the years after the First World War, planetary astronomy was long relatively neglected by professional astronomers, at least in the United States.
		The true tones of the Martian dark areas are drab, dull reds and gray-browns; the greens and blues are mere results of a visual physiology effect known as simultaneous contrast, which causes a relatively neutral-toned area surrounded by a yellow-orange field to appear bluish green to the eye.
		Alternative (that is, nonvegetative) explanations of the intensity changes in Martian surface markings began with the view of Svante Arrhenius, the Nobel Prize--winning chemist, who suggested in 1912 that certain minerals known as hygroscopic salts might be responsible; these salts absorb water and show dramatic darkening on contact with it.
	www.uapress.arizona.edu /onlinebks/mars/chap10.htm (4908 words)

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