Here's another image in my Mars Expedition series. On closer inspection I realized I had to redo some details on the Lander, so this took a while. I can't get much art done on the days that I work. But Fridays, I have off. I had to do this scene upside down to get the "Mars in the sky" look, since the sun won't shine beneath the horizon in Bryce, even if there is no land (or water, or air) in the way. The material for the terrain used as Phobos's surface is a happy accident, a color and bump tweak of the randomly assigned texture that came up when I created the terrain. Not sure it's accurate, but until (and if) the Russian Phobos-Grunt probe arrives, it's as good a guess as any. (Oh, yeah, as an aside, after eighteen consecutive entries I'm finally a winner of the Writers of the Future contest! So the practice from writing these little fragments must be paying off. Ironically, the little snippet below is pretty lame.) Thanks for all your views, comments and favorites! --- From Phobos, it's a drop of six thousand kilometers to Mars. Luckily, escape velocity from the little moon is so low a galloping horse could manage it. With the heat shield blocking the main engine, the Universal Lander has only its thrusters to do the job. Fortunately, those little rocket motors feed from the same tanks as the main engine, and the propellant they need for the transfer to Mars still leaves enough for the final moments of the landing and for the return to orbit. After weeks of preliminary exploration of the small moon and a rearrangement of the Expedition Stack, the Lander slowly launches and pivots towards the Red Planet. Using the Stack's heat shield as a base, with the solar array still stowed and the nuclear generator's radiators turned to shadow themselves from the low sun, half the crew watches from the little outpost on Mars's innermost moon as the first two humans to descend to Mars slowly recede into the sky. --Excerpt from UXF promotional material, 2029.