When I started blogging here on T.S.M. in 2010, my posts covered climbing more broadly still about mountains and included a lot of literature, but my most popular post for years was about climbing Olympus Mons on Mars. It rises much higher than anything on the surface of the Earth partly because of the gravity on Mars is a third of the strength here at home. Climbing on Mars would be vastly different than here at home, which is what I wrote about.

I was recently reminded about another celestial climbing attraction. My kids learned about it at school and they told me about it that same day with a lot of enthusiasm. I thought about it now because there was a recent news story about the planet Uranus. It didn’t change much about this feature, but it drew me back in.

In 1986, when the Voyager 2 space probe inspected Uranus and its moons, about 2.8 billion kilometers (1.7 billion miles) from Earth, it discovered the largest cliff that we know about. Verona Rupes is on the moon named Miranda and may be as modest as five kilometers or as tall as 15! It’s a significant feature of Miranda, as it is unevenly shaped with a noticeable ridge, the subject cliff, as distinctive as a ridge on Denali. Wikipedia has the actual image that Voyager 2 captured and some other amazing facts. An artist conception on Reddit dot com has this to help us imagine more what it’s like.

The greatest cliffs on Earth don’t exceed much more than 1.6 kilometers (1 mile). Mount Thor, a slightly overhanging cliff boasts the greatest vertical drop on Earth is 5,495 feet. A fall from the top would take us long enough to think what am I doing and watch and re-watch your life pass by, which will take just more than 18 seconds. (Try waiting that long.) That’s because our gravity’s strength on Earth governs the game of climbing. (Heck, gravity controls and sets up the assumption of all of our games from chess, baseball, and football.)

It seems everyone likes to share how long it would take to fall from the top of Verona Rupes. Well, Miranda’s gravity is much, much weaker than Earth’s. The Moon’s is a third of Earths and Mars’ is two-thirds or Earths by comparison. (I sometimes wish Star Trek, Star Wars, and even Dune played around with varying gravity levels more.) On Miranda gravity is one 124th that of what we deem normal.

So if Verona Rupes was a straight drop, which it is not, and you jumped off the top, you would reach a base speed of 200 kilometers per hour and fall for 12 minutes, according to NASA. I wonder if you would just bounce off the bottom. Probably not at that speed.

Climbing it would require a space suit, which is like climbing Everest with oxygen and plenty of other environmental comforts on hand. It wouldn’t really be climbing like we do on Earth, which makes home pretty damn special. Still, I love the artist’s concept of this piece for sale on the Internet. Definitely check it out.

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