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The History Channel.
Original podcast. History this week.
October 27, 1972. I'm Sally Helm.
Scientists are probably some of the least likely people to believe in curses.
But even they may have been starting to wonder.
It's 1972. The United States and the Soviet Union are deep into the space race, and they've been trying for years to reach the planet Mars.
In 1964, the Soviet Union sent a mission called Zond -2.
It passed by Mars, but its communications failed.
So scientists couldn't learn much.
In 1969, the Soviet craft Mars 1969A exploded about seven minutes after launch.
Mars 1969B fared even worse.
One of its rockets exploded 0 .2 seconds after launch.
The craft tipped sideways, and then the rest of the rockets exploded, and it crashed.
In 1971, NASA's Mariner 8 also malfunctioned shortly after launch.
In total, the US and the Soviet Union have launched 15 missions to explore Mars.
And 11 have failed.
That is what has scientists talking about a Mars curse.
A great galactic ghoul gobbling up their ships.
But finally, the curse seems to have been broken.
On this day, NASA's Mariner 9 is at the very end of a year -long mission.
It made it off the launch pad.
It made it out of the Earth's atmosphere.
It made it all the way through space and ended up in the orbit of the cursed planet Mars.
It's the first man -made object to orbit another planet, but now it has finally reached the end of the line.
It's run out of gas, and so today it will end its service.
Scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, send it one last signal.
Deactivate. And with that, the mission is complete.
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Hello, everyone. My name is Wesley Levisay from the History of the Second World War podcast.
Join me on a journey through the most destructive conflict in human history.
A journey that will take us not just through the famous campaigns and cataclysmic battles, but also to the lesser well -known corners of the war that touched millions all over the world.
As we try and answer not just the questions of what and where, but how and why.
You can find History of the Second World War on all major podcast platforms or at historyofthesecondworldwar .com.
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Before the Mariner missions, some people truly believed that Mars might be inhabited by an advanced alien civilization.
But Mariner 9 has served a very important purpose, sending back detailed images of this faraway planet, and finally unlocking the secrets of Mars.
Today, our fraught relationship with the planet Mars.
How did so many people come to believe that the planet was inhabited by technologically sophisticated, canal -building Martians?
And when Mariner 9 let us finally look at the real Mars, what did we see?
We can't really say when Mars was discovered.
It's not like it's hiding.
It's pretty visible in the night sky.
Bright, reddish tint.
However, Galileo Galilei, legendary Italian astronomer, is the first to look at Mars through a telescope.
He can't get a great view, though.
Flowtech telescope.
Plus, Mars is small.
It's only about twice the size of the moon, and it's 140 times further away.
So that means even at its best, it's a very small object and requires a really good telescope like the one behind me.
William Sheehan is the co -author of the book Discovering Mars.
And yes, he was talking to us with a very large telescope right behind him.
If your audience could visualize where we're talking, they would see the Lowell Observatory's 24 -inch Clark refractor because I'm in the dome of that story telescope at the present moment.
The Lowell Observatory is a famous observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona.
Sheehan's been going there recently to research his next book.
And this huge telescope is, of course, way better than anything Galileo could have used, or any astronomers of his age.
They were trying, though, to see what they could of the planet Mars.
They noticed some confusing dark spots on the planet.
And by the early 19th century, some of these markings, the darker ones, seemed to have a bluish tint or a greenish tint.
A bluish tint. Could that be an ocean?
A greenish tint. Maybe that's some kind of forest or field.
Then in 1877, the Italian astronomer Giovanni Scapparelli notices these lines on the Martian surface.
Now, he used the Italian word cannelli, which can mean any of a number of things.
It can mean channels.
It can mean canals.
It can mean groves.
I mean, it has a lot of different meanings.
And he just used it as a shorthand basically to sort of say, well, I don't know what these features are, but let's call them cannelli.
This concept of canals ends up leading directly into one of the weirdest periods of our history with the planet Mars, all because an American named Percival Lowell is the one to pick up on Scapparelli's discovery.
Lowell is an aristocrat born into money, and he's brilliant.
He studied physics and math, but he couldn't figure out what to do with his life.
He broke off an engagement, left the family textile business, briefly became an expert on Japan.
And then in 1893, he gets a Christmas present from his cousin, Mary, a book about Mars.
It includes some of Scapparelli's drawings of the planet.
Lowell reads the book feverishly and becomes obsessed.
Before you know it, he is building an observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona.
The same one that Bill Sheehan was in when he called us.
And he set out with a real clear program of what he was hoping to find here in Arizona.
Namely, he really thought that he would be able to find evidence with the fine telescope that the canals were exactly, literally, that.
Exactly literally canals built by an advanced Martian civilization to spread water across the dry surface of Mars.
The explanation, Lowell was absolutely certain of, to the day of his death, was that they were canals that had been built in order to irrigate a dying planet, which was basically in its last throes, turning the desert, losing all of its water supply, and maintaining a last grasp on life before it barreled
into extinction. Lowell just basically imagined this whole epic saga.
But he did start to see evidence of his theory.
Like, those greenish areas on Mars seemed to darken with the seasons.
So he thought, okay, the plants are growing more during this time because of the water brought by the canals.
It's kind of a stretch, but he's telling everyone.
Lowell was an extraordinarily effective communicator with the public.
He was a brilliant lecturer.
And, of course, some of his peers in the scientific world really detested him, you know, as being just somebody that was out there grabbing publicity.
But the general public loved it.
And why wouldn't they?
I mean, he basically turned Mars into this story, the story of this advanced civilization struggling for survival on a dying planet.
People are really into this.
And, you know, Lowell's imagined version of Mars is inspiring.
Lowell had depicted the Martians as these super intelligent, benign, peaceable folks that had gotten past party politics.
You know, they basically had abolished warfare.
H .G. Wells, on the other hand.
Percival Lowell doesn't have a monopoly on stories about Mars.
Soon, science fiction writer H .G.
Wells puts forward his own vision.
So he made the Martians villains.
In Wells' 1898 novel The War of the Worlds, Martians invade Earth.
Mars is a dying planet, and they've come to extract Earth's resources.
The novel makes an extra impact 40 years after its publication, when director Orson Wells broadcasts a radio version that sounds like a real news report.
Some people tuning in believe that Martians have invaded New Jersey.
All of this solidifies Mars' place in the public imagination.
Mars became the premier object of science fiction, and also scientific investigation trailing behind that, because Mars was the one place we wanted to know about.
However... For the eyes of the world, now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond.
September 1962 is the height of the Cold War.
And by one very important metric, the U .S.
is way behind. The Russians at that point were taking no prisoners in the space race.
They were first in everything, first man in space, first woman in space.
So that's when Kennedy made his famous speech.
We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things.
Not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
Because that goes...
The target is now the moon.
And as a result, Mars kind of gets sidelined in the public mind.
But NASA is still making progress towards sending spacecraft to the red planet.
And even in the early 1960s, some people are still holding out hope that there might be Martians alive and well up there, including a young Bill Sheehan.
I mean, I grew up during that era.
You know, I got my first telescope in 1964, and I read all the several years out of date books about astronomy that I could find at the Branch Library near my house.
And those out -of -date books don't have definitive proof that there aren't Martians up there, digging canals, trying to save their planet.
It was still possible at that time to believe that Lowell's theories might somehow prove to be the case.
In 1960, NASA starts the Mariner program.
Mariner probes are equipped with cameras and other tools to observe both Venus and Mars.
The Soviet Union has a Mars program too.
MarsNIC -1 launches in 1960, but fails.
MarsNIC -2 also fails.
Sputnik -22 fails. Mars -1 fails.
Finally, the U .S. launches its first Mars probe, Mariner -3.
It fails too. But three weeks later, Mariner -4 successfully makes it to space.
Unfortunately, I would say if there were ever a Debbie Donner spacecraft, it was Mariner -4.
Mariner -4 is armed with a single, low -definition camera.
It zooms by Mars. It doesn't orbit or even slow down.
It has sent back these gray, drab, really ugly pictures.
But they are the first images that humans have ever taken up close of another planet.
You can make out some craters, some ridges.
That's about it. Importantly, though, there's no sign of life.
Other instruments reveal that Mars barely even has an atmosphere.
There is no evidence whatsoever of an advanced civilization trying to irrigate a dying planet.
A 10 -year -old Bill Sheehan is disappointed.
And when it comes to Mars exploration, this kind of takes the wind out of the sails.
After all, this looks like just a dry, cratered hunk of rock.
All of the scientists after Mariner -4 failed us.
Why go so far afield to just explore another moon?
That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
The big moment. Neil Armstrong takes the first step on the moon.
650 million people watch from Earth.
The United States wins the space race.
It's safe to say very few people are thinking about Mars.
But at NASA, the Mariner program continues.
Two weeks after the moon landing, Mariner's six and seven zoom by Mars and take some more blurry pictures.
And the Soviet Union's Mars program continues, too.
We wanted to prove that we could do it better than the Russians, and they wanted to prove that they could beat us at something.
The Soviets have big plans for the red planet.
Their next missions, Mars -2 and Mars -3, are actually going to land probes on the surface.
These would be the first man -made objects to land on Mars, even though nothing had even orbited the planet before.
They're skipping a step.
The Americans are more cautious.
They're planning a reconnaissance mission, a craft that will orbit Mars, taking photographs closer to the planet's surface than ever before.
They're both targeting the year 1971.
Because that is when Mars is the closest it will be to Earth for a very long time.
It's about 35 million miles, or for those of you, the very rare people in the audience who are using the metric system, 56 million kilometers.
The month of May is when the two planets will be at their very closest.
So the US and the USSR launch five total missions that month.
Two fall victim to the Mars curse.
But three make it out of the atmosphere.
The Soviets, Mars -2 and Mars -3, and the Americans, Mariner 9.
Mariner 9 hopes to become the first man -made object to orbit another planet.
It'll take all kinds of measurements and hopefully send back those clearer photographs.
But soon after Mariner 9 leaves Earth, there's a problem.
Astronomers across the world begin to notice something through their telescopes, including the young amateur astronomer, Bill Sheehan.
Well, lo and behold, I was a senior in high school at a small telescope when I was watching Mars.
And I remember the usually visible features, like service major and some of the other prominent areas, were increasingly difficult to make out.
And I pretty much sort of gave it up because I thought it was just my telescope.
It was not just Bill Sheehan's telescope.
Scientists everywhere are seeing it.
Mars is getting blurrier and blurrier.
There was not a single detail to be seen, and what scientists had discovered was the largest global dust storm that had ever been recorded in the history of human observation of the red planet.
Before they know it, the surface of Mars is completely hidden.
Now, is this dust storm just bad luck for Mariner 9?
Or a conspiracy? There were some people that thought that the whole dust storm thing had been set up by the Martians to obscure so that they would have time to hide it from view.
If the dust storm continues, Mariner 9 won't be able to see a thing.
Which would mean it's gone to Mars for nothing, a wasted mission.
Scientists just have to hope that the biggest dust storm they had ever seen on Mars will clear in time.
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Three Mariner spacecraft have flown by Mars in recent years.
They were fleeting glimpses, and the craft did not fly close to the mysterious red planet.
2 ,000 miles was the closest.
Mariner 9 changed all that.
As it's breaking rocket.
On November 14, 1971, Mariner 9 enters Mars' orbit.
But the dust storm is still raging.
So NASA makes a decision.
Essentially, Mariner 9's cameras went into hibernation.
Scientists remotely shut down the cameras onboard the spacecraft.
Taking pictures now would be a waste of resources.
Roughly two weeks later, the Soviets Mars 2 enters orbit, and then Mars 3 a few days after that.
And unlike Mariner 9, these spacecraft couldn't be controlled remotely.
They were all pre -programmed, so essentially, when Mars 2 and 3 arrived at Mars, they went into operation.
They start snapping pictures while Mars is still engulfed in dust.
The Russian photographs were, I think they got 60 images, and they were essentially blank.
And remember, Mars 2 and Mars 3 are not just orbiting, they're also sending probes down to the surface.
A surface that is, again, experiencing an almost unimaginably large dust storm.
So, the probe from Mars 2 becomes the first man -made object to...
crash into Mars. The probe from Mars 3, it does land, although there is still debate over whether this landing really counts.
It's on the surface for one minute and 50 seconds before contact is lost.
Most likely, they ended up in gale -like conditions where, essentially, all their electronics in that were coated with dust and unable to function.
For Mariner 9, patience wins out.
By mid -December, weeks later, the dust begins to clear, and scientists power up the cameras on Mariner 9.
As it circles the planet twice a day, it will photograph and gather data for at least three months, mapping 70 % of the planet's surface.
The images come in slowly.
It takes five hours for the signal to travel from Mariner 9 to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
When they arrive, the images are broadcast on a TV screen in the upstairs imaging office.
Scientists then take Polaroids of the screen and bring them downstairs.
The science team pastes them on this massive globe, mapping the surface of Mars Polaroid by pasted Polaroid.
As the Mariner 9 returns its vast accumulation of data and pictures, scientists will have their first close -up view and, hopefully, clues to the history and evolution of Mars, the Earth, and the solar system.
One of the scientists on the Mariner team is a young Carl Sagan.
He's studying temperature data from Mariner 9 while the dust storm is still going on, and he later uses that as the basis for a theory about a possible nuclear winter that could be caused by atomic weapons on Earth.
He's also among the first to notice an intriguing feature on the surface of Mars.
Shield volcanoes. They're low and broad, named because they look a little like a shield lying on the ground.
And one of these shield volcanoes on Mars is, so far as we know, the largest mountain in the entire solar system.
It's named Olympus Mons.
Olympus Mons is as large as the state of Arizona.
It's also 72 ,000 feet high, two and a half Mount Everests.
As Mariner 9 continues its orbit, Mars slowly comes into focus, and scientists answer some old questions, like about those dark green areas that seemed to change with the seasons that might have been vast swathes of plant life.
They are actually evidence of Mars' epic winds.
What we see on Mars, this mix of darker and lighter, is just essentially a little like an ocean sketch where these different kinds of little things are being scattered about by the winds, and so the light stuff gets blown over the dark, and then after the seasons change again in the wind shift direction,
then it gets scoured off again, and then the dark areas are revealed.
And so all of this kind of meteorological phenomena is essentially what created the illusion that Mars was a living planet with vegetation that waxed with the spring or waned with the autumn.
As for Percival Lowell's biggest theory, the Martian -made canals that had been built to irrigate a dying planet?
The answer is neither completely yes nor completely no.
I mean, no, there is an evidence that Martians dug these waterways, but there are massive canyons on Mars, and one of them lines up with the canals that Lowell had mapped out, Valles Marineris, named for Mariner 9.
It's essentially the Grand Canyon of the earth writ large on Mars, but adorbs the Grand Canyon, which could easily fit inside.
It isn't a canal, but at one point, water probably ran through it, and this evidence of liquid water, it raises some very big questions.
Mars had this era when it had running water on the surface, and then it lost its oceans, it lost its water, it lost its atmosphere.
Now the atmosphere is so thin and the planet is bone dry, so what happened to Mars?
Scientists are still trying to figure that out.
Since Mariner 9, there have been more than 30 missions to Mars, and the so -called curse continues.
12 of those missions experienced some kind of failure, but we've still learned a lot.
Though we haven't answered the big question, was there ever life on Mars?
Bill Sheehan hopes that the answer is yes.
I mean, I would much rather have a history of a living Mars than a dead Mars, even though I also believe that the secret to happiness is low expectations, so I don't want to get my hopes up too much.
But Sheehan has recently gotten to feel a little bit of hope.
In July of 2024, NASA's Perseverance rover found a very interesting rock.
It was laid down very early in Martian history when there was all of this liquid water that was flowing on the surface, and so we're going to essentially be peeling back the past of Mars and finding out all the intricacies of its earlier chemical, geological history.
Much of that story has not yet been revealed, but this rock contains some distinctive little spots, spots that could have been formed billions of years ago by ancient microbial life.
We still don't know, but it's possible that this is the first real sign of some kind of Martian, from way back when water did flow through those canyons, maybe even used by Martians as canals.
Thanks for listening to History This Week, a Back Pocket Studios production in partnership with the History Channel.
To stay updated on all things History This Week, sign up at historythisweekpodcast .com.
And if you have any thoughts or questions, send us an email at historythisweekathistory .com.
Special thanks to our guest William Sheehan, author of Discovering Mars, A History of Observation and Exploration of the Red Planet.
Also a thank you to Kevin Schindler, historian of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona.
This episode was produced and sound designed by Ben Dixitine and produced and story edited by me, Sally Helm.
For Back Pocket Studios, our executive producers are Ben Dixitine and David Weisbord.
From the History Channel, our executive producers are Eli Lehrer and Liv Fiddler.
Don't forget to follow, rate and review History This Week wherever you get your podcasts, and we will see you next week.
Hey listeners, we just wanted to let you know that as we head into the holidays, History This Week is not going anywhere.
You'll have plenty of new stories to share with family and friends, so when you're showing off everything you learned, make sure to tell them you got it from History This Week.
