Mars/History

## History

Mars is named after the roman god of war, an equivalent to the greek Ares.

### Discovery in 1610

The ancient Sumerians believed that Mars was Nergal, the god of war and plague. During Sumerian times, Nergal was a minor deity of little significance, but, during later times, his main cult center was the city of Nineveh. In Mesopotamian texts, Mars is referred to as the "star of judgement of the fate of the dead". The existence of Mars as a wandering object in the night sky was recorded by the ancient Egyptian astronomers and, by 1534 BCE, they were familiar with the retrograde motion of the planet. By the period of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, the Babylonian astronomers were making regular records of the positions of the planets and systematic observations of their behavior. For Mars, they knew that the planet made 37 synodic periods, or 42 circuits of the zodiac, every 79 years. They invented arithmetic methods for making minor corrections to the predicted positions of the planets. In Ancient Greek, the planet was known as Πυρόεις.

### 19th Century

the 19th century, the resolution of telescopes reached a level sufficient for surface features to be identified. A perihelic opposition of Mars occurred on September 5, 1877. In that year, the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli used a 22 cm (8.7 in) telescope in Milan to help produce the first detailed map of Mars. These maps notably contained features he called canali, which were later shown to be an optical illusion. These canali were supposedly long, straight lines on the surface of Mars, to which he gave names of famous rivers on Earth. His term, which means "channels" or "grooves", was popularly mistranslated in English as "canals".

Influenced by the observations, the orientalist Percival Lowell founded an observatory which had 30 and 45 cm (12 and 18 in) telescopes. The observatory was used for the exploration of Mars during the last good opportunity in 1894 and the following less favorable oppositions. He published several books on Mars and life on the planet, which had a great influence on the public. The canali were independently found by other astronomers, like Henri Joseph Perrotin and Louis Thollon in Nice, using one of the largest telescopes of that time.

### Present Day (21st Century)

Once spacecraft visited the planet during NASA's Mariner missions in the 1960s and 70s, these concepts were radically broken. The results of the Viking life-detection experiments aided an intermission in which the hypothesis of a hostile, dead planet was generally accepted.

Mariner 9 and Viking allowed better maps of Mars to be made using the data from these missions, and another major leap forward was the Mars Global Surveyor mission, launched in 1996 and operated until late 2006, that allowed complete, extremely detailed maps of the Martian topography, magnetic field and surface minerals to be obtained. These maps are available online; for example, at Google Mars. Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Express continued exploring with new instruments, and supporting lander missions. NASA provides two online tools: Mars Trek, which provides visualizations of the planet using data from 50 years of exploration, and Experience Curiosity, which simulates traveling on Mars in 3-D with Curiosity.

### The Formation of the Settlement Defense Front

As the Earth is nearly depleted in natural resources due to the vast majority expansion of space colonies and breathtaking explorations, The origins of the Settlement Defense Front lie in the 'gold rush' period of planetary colonization when colonists first began leaving Earth. The Front was first created as a means of enforcing martial law on off-world colonies. At some point they became radicalized and went rogue, instigating a rebellion against the Earth-led Government of Mars.

Thirty years before the events of Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, SetDef initiated the "Secession Wars" against Earth's authority, the conflict spread throughout the solar system resulting in more planets being captured by the Front, peace was later reached after the signing of the "Charon accords" establishing the Settlement Defense Front as an independent fascist state separate from the Earth and allowing Setdef control over Mars and other territories. After losing Mars to the Front, the Earth created the United Nations Space Alliance.

### Aftermath

The SDF suffered heavy losses, with much of their entire military structure in shambles and their economy in ruins. Several SDF High Council members, which lead the entire SDF in both state and military affairs, were assassinated in UNSA's Operation Deep Execute. Admiral Kotch, their foremost admiral as well as many Ace captains and pilots were also killed throughout the war. The majority of the SDF fleet was also decimated, due to a Trojan Horse-style attack by the captured Olympus Mons on the SDF's Orbital Shipyard on Mars, and the others destroyed by tag-team tactical ops from the crews of Tigris and SWC-141 Retribution. The SDF also lost its primary means of ship production, with the destruction of their Orbital Shipyard and the UNSA taking control of most resource gathering facilities in the Solar System. With neither efficient ship production nor resource production in their hands, the SDF's ability to project interplanetary power was severely depleted.

The war ultimately ends in a strategic victory for the UNSA, with the Earth safe from an SDF invasion, the SDF military and naval forces crippled and with most resource-producing facilities in the Solar System under its command enabling it to quickly rebuild its effectively fleet, unlike the SDF in the immediate future. Despite this, the SDF achieved a tactical victory over the UNSA by decimating its fleet and defensive capabilities. The true end of the war is currently not known for sure, however, the final cutscene in Infinite Warfare, as well as the situation at the end of the game, seems to imply that the UNSA emerged victoriously over the SDF, or at least achieved a stalemate.