How to get down Valles Marineris
In my World, a perfect storm of catastrophic size strikes earth and black-death levels of mortality ensue, cutting short the Great Space Race. The only problem is that there are over 10,000 people stuck on Mars, but with mortality in the billions, Earth nations (or whatever is left of them) can hardly concern themselves with a few thousand wayward souls.
Fortunately for the far-flung Martian colonies, a man by the name of Diego OfeAde unifies them with the generous support of ClF3, and is named Arbiter of Mars.
Now with the Martians only lacking a common residence, Diego decides that the future of Human Mars is at the Bottom of Valles Marineris. It has a few benefits; thicker atmosphere, aquifers, warmth during the day and night, protection from sand storms, etc. There is one little problem: a four-mile deep cliff between them and the valley floor.
Diego, however, has good faith in his friend Guoliang Guan to get their 250,000 tons of material down the chasm with their circa 2100~ technology and the industrial capacity of Atlanta.
My Question is:
How can the martians achieve the Herculean task of moving all quarter-of-a-million tons of (presumably fragile) material safely to the bottom of Valles Marineris?
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1 answer
Cut a road into the canyon walls.
In order to build stuff on Mars, they are going to need a lot of heavy earth moving equipment. Simply start digging/mining along the edge of the canyon, and make a very long ramp that the equipment can be hauled down. Then it's just a matter of driving down.
Soil on Mars
Marian soil is called regolith. It's basically a lot of rock, broken stones, and super fine dust, some of which is as small as 0.15 microns.
As others have noted the walls of the canyon are somewhat weathered, and a lot of the length would be considered very steep, versus sheer.
In other places you'll find basalt and other volcanic rock.
Valles Marineris is believed to be a tectonic fault where two plates separated while the planet was still cooling. If this is correct, then the bedrock would be very hard, but there is likely to be a lot of regolith piled up where the bedrock has weathered.
There may be places along the canyon where you could get away with a switchback road bulldozed through the surface. Other places may need to have the road cut into the rock more.
In regards to the regolith, you'd want a bulldozer or other large equipment to push boulders out of the way, and smooth/level the ground for the road.
You also would want something like a steamroller to compress the soil and keep it from crumbling away under the heavy loads.
You wouldn't want to go strait down hill with several ton load if the grade is too steep, and switchbacks might not be practical in all areas because the lower road can undercut the stability of the upper road, which would be bad, especially if the soil is loose.
Also, you wouldn't want a gradient of much more than 20%.
Gradient is calculated by dividing the vertical rise by the length of the run.
Working backward we get 20% = 7km(4mi) / 35km(21mi). So that means we need a road that is at least 35km long, which can either run parallel to the rim or switch back as the terrain allows.
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