 |
 |
||
 |
|
||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||||||||
 |
Projects: Messages from EarthThe Phoenix DVD
In May of 2008, the spacecraft Phoenix will land in the northern polar regions of the planet Mars. One after the other, the spacecraft's scientific instruments will come alive, and begin their search for water ice in the harsh Martian environment. Nestled among busy instruments, a small and very special DVD will wait patiently for its turn. This unique DVD is made of silica glass, and designed to last hundreds if not thousands of years into the future, when its true mission will commence. It carries nothing less than a message from our world to one centuries away, when humans will roam the Red Planet. In a unique project called Visions of Mars, the Phoenix DVD carries personal messages from visionaries of our own time to future visitors or settlers on Mars. There is Carl Sagan near his home in Ithaca, New York, addressing the future Martians with a cascading water fall in the background. There is Arthur Clarke seated in the comfort of his home in tropical Sri Lanka. There is Planetary Society Executive Director Louis Friedman, speaking from Society headquarters in Pasadena, and there is Phoenix mission PI, Peter Smith, providing mission information and a greeting to the future. Others speak to the future not directly, but through their visionary works, which shaped our imaginings of the Red Planet. A wealth of influential pieces are included in Visions of Mars, which was assembled and edited by Planetary Society advisor Jon Lomberg. Percival Lowell, in beautiful poetic prose, expounds his theory of the "Mars canals," and the intelligent beings that built them. H.G. Wells, in War of the Worlds, imagines what such desperate creatures might do to our own beloved Earth. The recording of Orson Welles' 1938 radio broadcast of this classic tale -- which set off a wave of panic across the United States -- is also digitally encoded on the Phoenix DVD. Louis Friedman contributed an afterword, describing the origins and history of Visions of Mars, and how it came to be. The Planetary Society gives ordinary people a stake in exploring space... Among those included in this remarkable message to the future are Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Poul Anderson, a musical production of Bob Derkach's "Winds of Mars," and many others. A collection of rare Mars artwork, reflecting our changing images of our neighboring planet can also be found on the Phoenix DVD. All this, and much, much more, from the visionaries of the past century, whose dreams of Mars shaped our own. Thousands of People will be there with Them.Thousands of people from around the world, joined our age's visionaries of space exploration by adding their names to this remarkable message to the future! The Planetary Society collected names, which are traveling to Mars on the Phoenix DVD. When the Martians of the future find and decode our message to them, their names will be there too, a permanent record of their part in the story of space exploration.
Names were collected and the mini-DVD provided by The Planetary Society. Engineering support was provided by Visionary Products, Inc., and discs and data writing were donated by Plasmon OMS. The Phoenix Mission is led by Principal Investigator Peter H. Smith of the University of Arizona, with project management at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and development partnership with Lockheed Martin Space Systems. International contributions for Phoenix are provided by the Canadian Space Agency, the University of Neuchatel (Switzerland), the University of Copenhagen, and the Max Planck Institute in Germany. |
||||||||||
 |
 |
||||||||||
[ what is this? ]