 The recorded history of Mars observation dates back to the era of the ancient Egyptian astronomers in the 2nd millennium BCE . Chinese records about the motions of Mars appeared before the founding of the Zhou Dynasty ( 1045 BCE ) . Detailed observations of the position of Mars were made by Babylonian astronomers who developed arithmetic techniques to predict the future position of Mars. nobody had any idea what they were observing.
The first recorded observation of the phases of Mars was by the Greek astronomer Hipparchus in 128 BCE. In 1610, Galileo Galilei was the first to observe the planet’s phases.