📜 A Letter from the Red Warrior of the Solar System ❤️🪖 Mars
🌋 A follow-up story branching from The Creation Chapter in Geography Album 🪐✨ This time, children hear from Mars himself—the rusty-red neighbour of Earth—who tells of his birth in the swirling cosmic dust, how heavy particles sank to his core, and how lighter ones rose to his surface, just as they learned in the First Great Story. 🌫️⚙️ He boasts of Olympus Mons, the tallest volcano in the Solar System, his gigantic canyons, and his two speedy moons, Phobos and Deimos, who chase each other through his skies. 🌙🐾 The story invites children to explore further: “From what elements am I made? Why is my dust red? Could you model my layers? And what did your rovers find when they rolled across my plains?” 🚀🕵️♂️ This letter connects to the other planetary stories in the chapter, revealing how each star has its own history, geology, and mysteries waiting to be explored.
GEOGRAPHY STORIES
8/11/20252 min read
Dear Children of Earth 🌍,
I’m Mars—the red planet! ❤️ No, I’m not blushing—I’m covered in rusty dust that gives me my glowing, copper-red color. If you spot me in your night sky ✨, I shine like a fiery star—but I’m a planet, your neighbor, just one step further from the Sun than you. ☀️
I was born over 4.5 billion years ago ⏳, from the same swirling hot clouds of dust 🌫️ and gas 💨 as my planetary brothers and sisters. Like you discovered in the First Great Story, the tiniest particles sorted themselves—heavy metals sank to my center ⚙️, lighter ones floated up 🪨, and my thin air drifted above.
You might call me a cold desert planet. My days are sometimes warm enough for a walk in a sweater, but my nights? ❄️ Brrr! Much colder than your snowiest winter—even penguins would say “Nope.” 🐧 I have the tallest volcano in the entire Solar System—Olympus Mons 🗻—three times taller than Mount Everest, so tall it reaches above my clouds! And my canyons? Oh, my friend, my biggest one is so long it could stretch from one side of Earth’s United States to the other! That’s one giant slide. 🎢
I spin much like you do, so a day here is just a little over 24 Earth hours ⏳. But my year? It takes almost twice as long as yours—687 Earth days—to dance around the Sun. That means you’d have to wait forever for your birthday cake 🎂!
Oh, and remember that chart of the Sun 🌞—the one showing how small Earth is compared to its fiery flames? 22 Earths in one of those flames. Well, compared to Earth, I’m smaller too—about half your size! In fact, if you took almost two whole Mars planets and squished them together, you’d finally have one Earth. 🌍 But I make up for my smaller size with my two tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos 🌓, who zip around me like two playful pups chasing each other in space. 🐾
And guess what? Sometimes I get visitors! 🤖🚀 Not people (yet), but brave little robot explorers you’ve sent from Earth. You call them “rovers”—like Curiosity, Perseverance, and my retired friend Opportunity. They roll over my rocky plains, climb my hills, take selfies 📸, and even search for clues about whether I might have had water long ago. They’re like tiny space detectives 🕵️♂️ in metal suits, sending home stories about me every day. Maybe one day you can visit me for real—explore my surface, and tell even more interesting things about me.
💭 I wonder… Could you find out which elements make up my rusty skin? Why does my sky sometimes turn pink or butterscotch? Could you design a mini model of me with my two moons, show how I spin, and re-create a Mars sunset? (Shhhh: it’s blue, not red!) 🌅
With red-dusty greetings,
Mars
