The story of the “first discovery” of Martian moons is a funny one! In 1609, the Italian astronomer and scientist, Galileo Galilei, started making telescopic observations of celestial bodies. He was quite good at it, because a year later, he became the very first person to see Mars and four of Jupiter’s largest moons through a telescope! It was during this time that Johannes Kepler, a famous German astronomer, received a letter from Galileo. It contained a coded message (back then, scientists used to regularly communicate with each other this way). To Kepler, it seemed to say “Mars has two moons.” But in reality, Galileo was talking about Saturn’s moons (which were later proven to be its rings)!
The next “clue” came in 1726 in Jonathan Swift’s book Gulliver’s Travels! If you have read it you probably remember the flying island, Laputa, and its astronomy-loving residents who “discover” the two moons of Mars! Maybe Swift was inspired by Kepler, or he simply made a guess based on the number of moons Mercury, Venus, the Earth and Jupiter were then known to have. Twenty-six years later, another writer too used this two-Martian-moons idea in his story, Micromegas, and his name was Voltaire.
These famous works of fiction popularized the concept of Mars having two moons well before they were actually discovered by Asaph Hall in 1877 – more than a century after their publication!
Picture Credit : Google
