mars1

Mars was a mystery to ancient astronomers, due to the fact that it did not follow the older conception of circular orbits and uniform motion. Mars did not seem to follow a straight path but rather one that was direct sometimes but sometimes curved across the sky. Being that this defied the Ptolemaic idea of hierarchies Johannes Kepler set out to observe and track the planet in the night sky, using Tycho Brahe's superior naked-eye observations of the planet Kepler was able to come up with the laws of motion that the planet followed. This discovery of the motion of Mars led to the modern gravitational theory of our solar system. Kepler found the orbit of Mars to be elliptical, by which the planet moved in a non-uniform but in a predictable motion.
Some of the earliest noted visual observations of Mars were made in and around 1610. The person most noted for seeing Mars was a man by the name of Galileo. Galileo looked to the night sky to try and find answers to the universe. Galileo was known to have made maps of Mars; it was Christian Huygens who is most often credited for a very accurate depiction of the surface of Mars, in 1659. Huygens was noted for drawing in the area of Mars now known as Syrtis Major. The Martian polar caps were only added to the map of Mars in about 1666. The Italian-born French immigrant Gian D. Cassani was noted for doing this.
The rotation of the axis was discovered by Huygens in 1659, and measured by Cassini in 1666. This measurement was known to be 24 hours and 40 minutes (this was only in error by about three minutes as recorded by later scientists). The moons of Mars were only really noticed later in 1877 by Hall.
Many of the early observations also documented the tenuous Mars atmosphere thus discovering some key elements of the planet. Sir William Herschel, measured the tilt of the planet on its axis, and noted that there may actually be seasons on Mars, observed the first discovery of the planet's tilt. Late in the 18th century it has been documented that Mars has several meteorological and seasonal phenomena. Some of these phenomena include several sightings of clouds (yellow, blue, white, and gray clouds). These cloud formations, and the discovery that the polar caps were waxing and waning, caused the early scientists to believe that Mars may have water. Although there was great speculation on these phenomena the scientists would have to wait for the actual exploration of Mars which happened a couple centuries later.
Until the 1960's the only thing scientists had to go on for conclusions of Mars where the observations made through telescopes. Even though these telescopes were now getting larger and more powerful, there was still the problem of the Earth's atmosphere interfering with the light waves that are visible. Trying to remedy this problem, the scientists tried different land-based methods to better assess Mars. None of these attempts ever truly succeeded.
After advances in solid and liquid fueled rockets, scientists began to ponder the possibility of entering space to solve the problem they were having with the interference from the Earth's atmosphere. After a period of trial and error, scientists finally figured out how to penetrate the Earth's atmosphere and put a rocket in orbit.