The red point grew larger and clearer with every passing moment. When Byeol-maru finally entered Mars’s orbit, Hyeongseop caught his breath at the sight of the red desert filling the entire window.
“Byeoli, it’s really Mars. But somehow it feels different from before.”
“This time we’re not just passing through, we’re actually going to look closely. Here, take a look down there.”
As Byeol-maru dropped lower, Hyeongseop noticed an enormous crack stretching all the way to the horizon, as if someone had dragged a giant claw deep across the surface of Mars.
“What is that? It’s incredibly long.”
“That’s called Valles Marineris. It’s the largest canyon on Mars, nearly ten times longer than Earth’s Grand Canyon, and several times deeper. If it were on Earth, it would stretch clear across the entire continent.”
Hyeongseop couldn’t close his mouth. As Byeol-maru drifted slowly along the canyon’s edge, rugged red cliffs stretched on endlessly.
“How did a canyon this huge even form? I learned that the Grand Canyon on Earth was carved out by a river.”
“Mars is a bit different. This canyon formed a very long time ago, when massive shifts deep inside Mars cracked the surface apart. Over a long time after that, wind wore it down until it became this wide and this deep.”
“So it wasn’t water, it was the ground splitting apart.”
“Exactly. But here’s the interesting part, traces of ancient flowing water have also been found scattered along the canyon walls. It seems that after the crack first formed, water flowed through that gap for a while too.”
Hyeongseop tried to guess the depth all the way down to the canyon floor, but he couldn’t quite wrap his mind around it.
“If someone tried to walk the whole length of this canyon, how long would it take?”
“Even walking nonstop, it would take more than several months. That’s how long it is. If you stood right in the middle of it, the tops of the cliffs on either side would be so far away, the sky might look like nothing more than a thin ribbon.”
“Whoa… I can barely imagine that.”
As Byeol-maru cleared the canyon, a massive, round mountain rose up over the distant horizon. Hyeongseop’s eyes lit up.
“Wait, that mountain! Isn’t that the one we talked about before, the tallest one in the whole solar system?”
“That’s right, Olympus Mons. Good memory. It happens to be right around here too.”
Hyeongseop felt that this red planet, with its canyon and its towering volcano side by side, held a far more dynamic history than he’d ever imagined. It looked like a quiet, dry desert, but it was actually a world that had never stopped moving, with ground splitting apart, water once flowing through, and volcanoes rising up, all over an immense stretch of time.
Byeol-maru picked up speed again, beginning to pull away from Mars’s orbit.
“Byeoli, where to next?”
“From here on, the scenery is going to look quite different. A place scattered between the planets, filled with countless drifting rocks. Ready to head into the asteroid belt?”
Hyeongseop nodded, watching the red planet slowly shrink behind them. Outside the window, small scattered points of light began to catch his eye, one by one, in the darkness.
(To be continued — Episode 3: The Asteroid Belt, Through a Forest of Stone)
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