[7][21][22] Through his mother, Dorothée, Jacques-André was also a direct descendant of the Eidguenot patriot François Favre, who famously clashed (with later support from his son-in-law, Ami Perrin) with the Calvinist rule of Geneva.

[23][24][25] Jean-Robert wanted his son to become a career soldier, but a severe burn to the thigh in childhood rendered Jacques-André permanently disabled and unfit for future service.

[27] He completed his studies in 1762,[28] and journeyed to France and England in 1765, where he became friends with astronomers Jérôme Lalande, John Bevis, who discovered the Crab Nebula, and Nevil Maskelyne, among others.

[29] In April 1768, upon the recommendation of Lalande and Bernoulli, Mallet was invited to Russia by Catherine the Great and the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences to prepare to observe the 1769 transit of Venus from Ponoy [ru], Lapland.

[42] The same year, Mallet convinced his fellow members of the council to approve construction of a permanent observatory on the casemate of the Bastion St-Antoine,[43] provided he settle a portion of the financing himself and supply accurate time calculations to the city watchmakers.

[44][45][46] For the structure's design, Mallet had departed from a traditional, utilitarian plan,[NB 1] instead building a single-story octagon, capped with a drum and small dome.

[43][47] To furnish the observatory, Mallet purchased and installed a 10-foot achromatic telescope, likely manufactured by the English optician John Dollond, a high-precision clock from the French maître Jean-André Lepaute, and a meridian bezel, crafted by Jeremiah Sisson, to better calculate the duration of Earth's rotation for timekeeping.

[3][29][49] With his pupils and assistants, including Marc-Auguste Pictet and Jean Trembley, Mallet continued to observe celestial objects and bodies, and their interactions with each other and the Earth.

[62][63] However, since no given name was originally denoted, Swiss astronomer Marcel Golay, eighth director of the Geneva Observatory (1956-1992), suggested that Blagg and Müller had labelled the eponymous crater in honor of Jacques-André.

[7][64] Founder and director of Geneva's Museum of the History of Science, chemist Marc Cramer (1892-1976), also supported the misnomer theory, though he implied the crater was first named by Johann Schmidt.