Who Discovered Planet Mars?

No single individual is credited with the discovery of Mars, as knowledge of its existence goes back to ancient times. Knowledge of Mars dates back to at least the Ancient Romans, who gave it its present name, and the Ancient Egyptians, who named it "the Red One."

In modern times, important discoveries about Mars include the discovery of its first geographic features in 1659 by Christian Huygens and the discovery of the planet's two moons, Phobos and Deimos, in 1877 by astronomer Asaph Hall. Important discoveries about Mars' movements were made by Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler. In 1976, Viking 1 and 2 became NASA's first probes to land on the surface of Mars.