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days ago. And then in a flash, it happened.
    “ 10… 9… Iowa, you have
horizontal acceleration. Rockets are engaged at 100%... 4... 3...
2… 1… Mars Shuttle Iowa has lifted off from the runway. Second leg
mission clock has commenced at four hours, twelve minutes, and
seven seconds GMT.”
    …
    Even though Garrison had
already seen Earth and the Moon from the sweeping view of space,
Garrison was even more stunned as he stared out of his shuttle down
onto the surface of Mars. While orbiting the red planet, he was
able to identify some of the most prevalent features that he’d
become so familiar with.
    He easily noticed the
massive scar-like canyon, Valles Marineris. The deepest, widest,
and longest canyon in the solar system, even from several hundred
miles above, Garrison was stunned at its massive structure. On
Earth, Marineris would stretch from Los Angeles to New York City,
with depths up to 25000 feet, and would span a distance of 125
miles wide. By comparison, the Grand Canyon would look like a small
ditch. He observed massively fractured canyons jutting off of both
sides of the main canyon walls, until Marineris narrowed tightly
into a maze of slot canyons, called Noctis Labyrinthus.
    The Labyrinth of the Night
was Garrison’s favorite feature of Mars. He was thrilled to
discover that part of his mission on Mars would entail a visit to
this feature, along with a significant investigation of the
geological—or, because it was Mars, and not the Earth,
areological—forces of this region. With his mouth open in surprise,
he attempted to gain a perspective a the massive sand dunes he saw
swirling up onto the canyon walls. He imagined that these
structures might rival anything found in the Sahara Desert, since
the canyon walls were as tall as 10,000 feet.
    The shuttle whisked him
away from the Labyrinth quicker than he would hope, and in craning
his neck to see the last of it, he hadn’t realized that he was
directly over the Tharsis Region mountain peaks: Arsia Mons,
Pavonis Mons, and Ascraeus Mons. Ranging from fifty to sixty
thousand feet in elevation, these three mountains arranged in a
straight line were easily identifiable.
    The jaw dropping
experience of the Tharsis Mountains had dazed the young astronaut,
but he quickly recovered to remember exactly where to locate
another impressive feature. The aptly named Olympus Mons—Mount
Olympus—sat on the western edge of the Tharsis region. While no
longer active, the solar system’s largest volcano grew to its
stature over a period of about 100 million years. Every astronaut
will attest that nothing can prepare you for awesome sight of
Olympus Mons from the ground. Towering at nearly 90000 feet or 17
miles above the mean level surface of Mars, you would have to stack
three Mount Everests on top of each other to understand the degree
of reverence this behemoth commands. As he passed just to the south
of the mountain, Garrison stared down into the 60-mile wide
caldera. Seeing the six impact craters at the top, Garrison could
understand just how difficult it would be for a meteor to actually
miss the top of this mountain. It just looked like a magnet the way
it leapt off of the plains surrounding it.
    On a second orbit of the
planet, Iowa entered Mars’ thin atmosphere with hardly any
indication. The shuttle began a sharp decent and leveled off
directly over a feature that Garrison had missed earlier. The
Hellas Impact Basin impressed Garrison greatly as he was only about
thirty miles above Mar’s largest impact crater. He shuttered to
think about the violence required for an impact to leave a hole
1500 miles wide and over five miles deep. In fact, seeing the
landscape peppered with hundreds of thousands of
craters-within-a-crater caused Garrison to shudder with concern for
his own safety at Camp Mars. However, he had to remind himself that
this landscape did not occur overnight, and that his odds of being
hit by a meteor on Mars was only a little better than