Early visions of Mars: Meet the 19th-century astronomer who used science fiction to imagine the red planet

Early visions of Mars: Meet the 19th-century astronomer who used science fiction to imagine the red planet

Camille Flammarion's work imagined what might exist beyond Earth in the universe. Three Lions/Hulton Archive via Getty ImagesLiving in today’s age of ambitious robotic exploration of Mars, with an eventual human mission to the red planet likely to happen one day, it is hard to imagine a time when Mars was a mysterious and unreachable world. And yet, before the invention of the rocket, astronomers who wanted to explore Mars beyond what they could…