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.

NASA’s Phoenix will be the first lander to explore the Martian arctic, landing near 70 degrees north latitude. Led by Principal Investigator (PI) Peter Smith of The University of Arizona, with project management by JPL, it is a fixed lander with a suite of advanced instruments and a robotic arm that will dig up to a meter into the soil. Its purpose is to look for and study the water ice that is expected to be found there. The mission will launch in August of 2007, and land on Mars in May, 2008.

Sign up now, and your name can be part of this message.

In a unique project called Visions of Mars, the Phoenix DVD will carry 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 will speak to the future not directly, but through their visionary works, which shaped our imaginings of the Red Planet. 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 off 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.

Your name can be there with Them.

Join our age's visionaries of space exploration by adding your name to this remarkable message to the future! From now until February 1, 2007, The Planetary Society is collecting names, which will travel to Mars on the Phoenix DVD. When the Martians of the future find and decode our message to them, your name will be there too, a permanent record of your part in the story of space.