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Projects: Messages from Earth

The Phoenix DVD

Click to enlarge > Visions of Mars, on Mars This image shows the DVD provided by The Planetary Society to the Phoenix mission, which contains 250,000 names of people who signed up to send their names to Mars. It also contains "Visions of Mars," messages to future Martian explorers, science fiction stories and art inspired by the Red Planet. The DVD is mounted on the deck of the lander, which sits about one meter above the Martian surface, visible in the background. Credit: NASA / JPL / U. Arizona

Phoenix Carries First Martian Library and 250,000 Names. Find out more.

Did you send your name to Mars on Phoenix? You can still find and print your participation certificate.

After landing, 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.

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 now on 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.