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first to notice that the sun moves relative to the stars. They called mars "the red one"
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The Danish astronomer, Tycho Brahe made surprisingly accurate calculations of the position of Mars 200 years before the telescope was invented,using his naked eye.
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observes Mars with a telescope, becoming the first person to use it for astronomical purposes.
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observes Mars and determines that the rotational period, or length of one Mars day is 24h, 40m.
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Huygens is the first to notice a white spot at the south pole, probably the southern polar cap.
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Huygens publishes Cosmotheros, which discusses what is required of a planet to support life, and speculates about intelligent extraterrestrials. This is one of the first published expositions of extraterrestrial life.
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observes "white spots" at the poles, and discovers that the southern cap is not centered on the rotational pole.
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wonders (correctly) if the "white spots" are ice caps.
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Honore Flaugergues, a French amateur astronomer, notices "yellow clouds" on the surface of Mars, which were later found to be dust clouds.
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William Whewell concludes that Mars has green seas and red land, and wonders if there is extraterrestrial life.
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Frederik Kaiser calculated the rotational period of Mars to be 24 hours, 37 minutes, 22.62 seconds
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Solviet union tried to send a flyby rocket to space, but failed
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soviet union, tried to send a flyby rocket to mars, but launch failed once again.
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Mariner 3 was launched on November 5, 1964, but the shroud encasing the spacecraft atop its rocket failed to open properly, and Mariner 3 did not get to Mars.
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Three weeks later, on November 28, 1964, Mariner 4 was launched successfully on an eight-month voyage to the red planet.
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Mars Pathfinder was originally designed as a technology demonstration of a way to deliver an instrumented lander and a free-ranging robotic rover to the surface of the red planet. Pathfinder not only accomplished this goal but also returned an unprecedented amount of data and outlived its primary design life
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Still in orbit around Mars, NASA's 2001 Mars Odyssey spacecraft has collected more than 130,000 images and continues to send information to Earth about Martian geology, climate, and mineralogy.
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In the future NASA hopes to be able to explore mars on air
