Schiaparelli became internationally famous for his studies ofMars. He was responsible for some of the best contemporary maps of Mars and was the first to locate many of the features of the planet with considerable accuracy. In his classic work on Martian observations,La Planète Mars, published in 1892,Camille Flammarion stated that Schiaparelli's was 'the greatest work which has been carried out with regard to Mars.'[7]
Schiaparelli was a member of many academies, Italian and foreign, including theAccademia dei Lincei, the Royal Academy of Sciences of Turin and theRegio Istituto Lombardo. He was appointed a senator of the Kingdom of Italy in 1889. Schiaparelli was the recipient of many national and international honours, including the unprecedented award of twoLalande Prizes from theFrench Academy of Sciences. In 1872, he was awarded theGold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society "for his researches on the connexion between the orbits of comets and meteors". Schiaparelli was elected to theAmerican Philosophical Society in 1901.[8] He retired in 1900 and died in Milan on 4 July 1910.
Among Schiaparelli's contributions are his telescopic observations ofMars. In his initial observations, he named the "seas" and "continents" of Mars. During the planet's "greatopposition" of 1877, he observed a dense network of linear structures on the surface of Mars, which he calledcanali in Italian, meaning "channels", but the term was mistranslated into English as "canals".[9]
While the term "canals" indicates an artificial construction, the term "channels"connotes indicates that the observed features were natural configurations of the planetary surface. From the incorrect translation into the term "canals", various assumptions were made about life on Mars; as these assumptions were popularized, the "canals" of Mars became famous, giving rise to waves of hypotheses, speculation, andfolklore about the possibility ofMartians, intelligent life living on Mars. Among the most fervent supporters of the artificial-canal hypothesis was the American astronomerPercival Lowell, who spent much of his life trying to prove the existence of intelligent life on the red planet.[9] After Lowell's death in 1916, astronomers developed a consensus against the canal hypothesis, but the popular concept of Martian canals excavated by intelligent Martians remained in the public mind for the first half of the 20th century and inspired a corpus of works of classicscience fiction.
Later, with notable thanks to the observations of the Italian astronomerVincenzo Cerulli, scientists came to the conclusion that the famous channels were actually mereoptical illusions. The last popular speculations about canals were finally put to rest during the spaceflight era beginning in the 1960s, when visiting spacecraft such asMariner 4 photographed the surface with much higher resolution than Earth-based telescopes, confirming that there are no structures resembling "canals".
In his bookLife on Mars, Schiaparelli wrote: "Rather than true channels in a form familiar to us, we must imagine depressions in the soil that are not very deep, extended in a straight direction for thousands of miles, over a width of 100, 200 kilometres and maybe more. I have already pointed out that, in the absence of rain on Mars, these channels are probably the main mechanism by which the water (and with it organic life) can spread on the dry surface of the planet."
In his 1877 Map of Mars, Schiaparelli devised an entirely new system of nomenclature that quickly superseded the previous one established byRichard A. Proctor. An expert on ancient astronomy and geography, Schiaparelli used Latin names, drawn from the myths, history and geography of classical antiquity; dark features were named after ancient seas and rivers, light areas after islands and legendary lands.
WhenE. M. Antoniadi took over as the leading telescopic observer of Mars in the early 20th century, he followed Schiaparelli's names rather than Proctor's, and the Proctorian names quickly became obsolete. In his encyclopedic workLa Planète Mars (1930), Antoniadi used all Schiaparelli's names and added more of his own from the same classical sources. However, there was still no 'official' system of names for Martian features.
In 1958, theInternational Astronomical Union set up an ad hoc committee underAudouin Dollfus, which settled on a list of 128 officially recognised albedo features. Of these, 105 came from Schiaparelli, 2 fromCamille Flammarion, 2 from Percival Lowell, and 16 from Antoniadi, with an additional 3 from the committee itself.
An observer of objects in theSolar System, Schiaparelli worked onbinary stars, discovered the large main-belt asteroid69 Hesperia on 29 April 1861,[11] and demonstrated that themeteor showers were associated withcomets.[12] He proved, for example, that the orbit of theLeonid meteor shower coincided with that of the cometTempel-Tuttle. These observations led the astronomer to formulate the hypothesis, subsequently proved to be correct, that the meteor showers could be the trails of comets. He was also a keen observer of the inner planetsMercury andVenus. He made several drawings and determined theirrotation periods.[12] In 1965, it was shown that his and most other subsequent measurements of Mercury's period were incorrect.[13]
Schiaparelli was a scholar of the history of classical astronomy. He was the first to realize that theconcentric spheres ofEudoxus of Cnidus andCallippus, unlike those used by many astronomers of later times, were not to be taken as material objects, but only as part of analgorithm similar to the modernFourier series.[citation needed]
1925 –Scritti sulla storia della astronomia antica (Writings on the History of Classical Astronomy) in three volumes. Bologna. Reprint: Milano, Mimesis, 1997.
^Hargitai, H.; Naß, A. (2019). "Planetary Mapping: A Historical Overview". In Hargitai, H. (ed.).Planetary Cartography and GIS. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography. Cham: Springer. pp. 27–64.doi:10.1007/978-3-319-62849-3_2.ISBN978-3-319-62848-6.
^Defrancesco, S. (April 1988). "Schiaparelli's determination of the rotation period of Mercury: a re-examination".Journal of the British Astronomical Association.98:146–150.Bibcode:1988JBAA...98..146D.
^"Schiaparelli Dorsum". Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature, International Astronomical Union (IAU) Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature (WGPSN).Archived from the original on 19 May 2024. Retrieved19 October 2016.
Tucci, Pasquale (2011). "The Diary of Schiaparelli in Berlin 26 October 1857-10 May 1859: a guide for his future scientific activity".Memorie della Società Astronomica Italiana.82 (240):240–247.Bibcode:2011MmSAI..82..240T.
Lombardi, A.M.; Mandrino, A. (2011). "G.V. Schiaparelli e l'astronomia dell'Unità d'Italia". In M. Cattaneo (ed.).Scienziati d'Italia: 150 anni di ricerca e innovazione. Turin: Codice Edizioni. pp. 19–35.
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