Question: What's the connection between "Gulliver's Travels" and Mars?
Answer: In his fantastic and satirical novel of 1726, Jonathan Swift foretold with uncanny accuracy the existence of the Red Planet's two tiny moons. Not only did Swift get the number of Martian moons right, but he also gave pretty good estimates of the times it takes for them to revolve around the planet.
In his account of Gulliver's voyage to the imaginary island of Laputa, Swift says the Laputans "have discovered two lesser stars, or satellites, which revolve around Mars; whereof the innermost is distant from the center of the primary planet exactly three of his diameters, and the outermost five; the former revolves in the space of 10 hours (actually about 7 and a half hours), and the latter in 21 and a half (about 30 hours)."
In 1877, more than a century later, American astronomer Asaph Hall turned his telescope on Mars, and there were two moonlets, just as Swift envisioned them. Hall named them Phobos (Greek for "fear") and Deimos ("panic" or "terror"), the names of the sons of the Greek war god Ares.
How did Swift come up with Martian moons so similar to the real ones? The telescopes in his time probably weren't powerful enough to detect the minute satellites. Most scholars think it was sheer luck.
By the way, 1877 was a big year for Mars studies — it was then that Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli reported sighting "canali," or "channels," on the Martian surface. Schiaparelli wouldn't say if he thought the channels were natural or artificial, but American Percival Lowell, of Boston and Flagstaff, had no doubts. He pounced upon Schiaparelli's channels and developed them into a spider web of vast canals built by intelligent Martians. Although natural channels do exist on the Red Planet, artificial canals visible from space do not.