Mars Plus

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The ochre-colored grains of fine sand ground under Roger Torraway s feet. He heard the sound of crunching like a cricket song in the thin Martian air rather than felt the grinding through his ankles. Not many human nerves connected to the steel shanks and hard plastic wedges that comprised his feet.

He glanced down at the tracks that he and his companion, Fetva Mikhailovna Shtev, were leaving on the windward face of this dune. A newcomer to Mars might worry that they were scarring the landscape for a millennium, so feeble must be the winds under an atmospheric pressure of something less than one percent of Earth average.

But what the air lacked in pressure it made up in mass, being ninety-five percent heavy molecules of carbon dioxide. Also, because this feeble atmosphere could not effectively spread the heat load that solar radiation pounded into the Martian landscape, weather systems tended to be global in scale: single wind cells circulated across the equator from the summer hemisphere to the winter latitudes, and thermal tides flowed from the warm dayside to the chilly night. Those winds racked up huge speeds as they went. A long-time resident like Roger had personally seen how, when the surface velocity exceeded 100 meters per second, large sand grains and small stones literally skipped over the face of the dunes, scattering tinier grains and sending up clouds of dust that would hang in the atmosphere for months, like smoke.

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