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Percival Lowell — news, coverage & facts — IJR

Founding of the Lowell Observatory

Lowell was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1892. He moved back to the United States in 1893. He became determined to study Mars and astronomy as a full-time career after reading Camille Flammarion's La planète Mars. He was particularly interested in the canals of Mars, as drawn by Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, who was director of the Milan Observatory. The Boston geologist George Russel Agassiz noted that Lowell made the decision to begin his observations after hearing that Schiaparelli began to experience failing eyesight. Beginning in the winter of 1893–94, using his wealth and influence, Lowell dedicated himself to the study of astronomy, founding the observatory which bears his name. He chose Flagstaff, Arizona Territory, as the home of his new observatory. At an altitude of over 2,100 meters (6,900 feet), with few cloudy nights, and far from city lights, Flagstaff was an excellent site for astronomical observations. This marked the first time an observatory had been deliberately located in a remote, elevated place for optimal seeing which included enhanced image quality, sharpness and steadiness. At his Flagstaff observatory Lowell favored the use of smaller telescopes rather than larger ones, believing that they were usually better for viewing fine planetary details. He was assisted in setting up his observatory by William H. Pickering, another observer of Mars who had noted the lines seen by Schiaparelli as well.

Lowell was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1897.

In 1904, Lowell received the Prix Jules Janssen, the highest award of the Société astronomique de France, the French astronomical society. For the last 23 years of his life, astronomy, Lowell Observatory, and his and others' work at his observatory were the focal points of his life.

World War I very much saddened Lowell, who was a dedicated pacifist. This, along with some setbacks in his astronomical work (described below), undermined his health and contributed to his death from a stroke on November 12, 1916, aged 61. Lowell is buried on Mars Hill near his observatory. Lowell claimed to "stick to the church" though at least one current author describes him as an agnostic.

Canals of Mars

For some fifteen years (1893 to about 1908) Lowell studied Mars extensively, making intricate drawings of the surface markings as he perceived them. Lowell published his views in three books: Mars (1895), Mars and Its Canals (1906), and Mars As the Abode of Life (1908). With these writings, Lowell more than anyone else popularized the long-held belief that these markings showed that Mars sustained intelligent life forms.

His works include a detailed description of what he termed the "non-natural features" of the planet's surface, including especially a full account of the "canals", single and double; the "oases", as he termed the dark spots at their intersections; and the varying visibility of both, depending partly on the Martian seasons. He theorized that an advanced but desperate culture had built the canals to tap Mars's polar ice caps, the last source of water on an inexorably drying planet.

While this idea excited the public, the astronomical community was skeptical. Many astronomers could not see these markings, and few believed that they were as extensive as Lowell claimed. As a result, Lowell and his observatory were largely ostracized. The consensus was that some actual features did exist that would account for the markings. In 1909, the sixty-inch Mount Wilson Observatory telescope in Southern California allowed closer observation of the structures Lowell had interpreted as canals, and revealed irregular geological features, probably the result of natural erosion.

The existence of canal-like features was definitively disproved in the 1960s by NASA's Mariner missions. Mariner 4, 6 and 7, and the Mariner 9 orbiter (1972), did not capture images of canals but instead showed a cratered Martian surface. Today, the surface markings taken to be canals are regarded as an optical illusion. This was likely exacerbated by a common mistranslation of the Italian word canale (which means channel rather than canal, and thus does not imply a designer). Psychologist Matthew J. Sharps has argued that perception of the canals by Lowell and others could have been the result of a combination of psychological factors, including individual differences, Gestalt reconfiguration, and sociocognitive factors.

Pluto

Lowell's greatest contribution to planetary studies came during the last decade of his life, which he devoted to the search for Planet X, a hypothetical planet beyond Neptune. Lowell believed that the planets Uranus and Neptune were displaced from their predicted positions by the gravity of the unseen Planet X. Lowell started a search program in 1906. A team of human computers, led by Elizabeth Williams, were employed to calculate predicted regions for the proposed planet. The program initially used a camera 5 inches (13 cm) in aperture. The small field of view of the 42-inch (110 cm) reflecting telescope rendered the instrument impractical for searching. From 1914 to 1916, a 9-inch (23 cm) telescope on loan from Sproul Observatory was used to search for Planet X. Lowell did not discover Pluto but later Lowell Observatory (observatory code 690) would photograph Pluto in March and April 1915, without realizing at the time that it was not a star.

In 1930, Clyde Tombaugh, working at the Lowell Observatory, discovered Pluto near the location expected for Planet X. Partly in recognition of Lowell's efforts, a stylized P-L monogram (♇) – the first two letters of the new planet's name and also Lowell's initials – was chosen as Pluto's astronomical symbol. However, it would subsequently emerge that the Planet X theory was mistaken.

Pluto's mass could not be determined until 1978, when its satellite Charon was discovered. This confirmed what had been increasingly suspected: Pluto's gravitational influence on Uranus and Neptune is negligible, not nearly enough to account for the discrepancies in their orbits. In 2006, Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet by the International Astronomical Union.

In addition, the discrepancies between the predicted and observed positions of Uranus and Neptune were found not to be caused by the gravity of an unknown planet. Rather, they were due to an erroneous value for the mass of Neptune. Voyager 2's 1989 encounter with Neptune yielded a more accurate value of its mass, and the discrepancies disappeared when using this value.