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The Astronomer Who Believed There Was an Alien Utopia on Mars
Percival Lowell’s dogged belief helped bring Mars science to 19th century America
Sarah Stewart Johnson is a planetary scientist, and the below is adapted from her new book, The Sirens of Mars.
There’s a tiny print of one of the Mariner 4 images on the wall of my office. I have it upside down and tilted, ever so slightly, to reflect true north. The picture is black and white, bordered with hatches. In the image, the sun shines down at an angle over the ragged Martian surface. It lights half the rim of each crater, then shadows the opposite side. I affixed it to the wall next to my desk because it speaks volumes about the challenge of doing science on other planets. The ground is visible in that grainy image, but it’s blanched of color, distant and barren.
I know that it’s Mars, the vast terrain south of Amazonis Planitia, but at the same time, it’s nothing like the Mars I know. It’s full of cartographic detail — a panoply of features and names. But if you step back a bit, what first catches the eye is the light and the shadow. All across the map are hubs and spokes: an extensive interconnected system of perfectly straight lines. The crisscrossing patterns are the color of smoke. They’re not black, not unambiguous, but they are…
