As Phoenix touched down on Mars, something wonderful happened.

The spacecraft delivered The Planetary Society's Visions of Mars DVD to the surface as a kind of time capsule for future explorers. Attached to the deck of the Phoenix lander, the DVD is, in effect, the first library on Mars. It includes a collection of 19th and 20th Century science fiction stories, essays and art inspired by the Red Planet, as well as the names of more than a quarter-million inhabitants of Earth.

The Visions content represents 20 nations and cultures and includes works by Planetary Society co-founder Carl Sagan, sf authors Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, and Kim Stanley Robinson, and Mars science pioneer Percival Lowell, among many more.

"There were really two reasons for doing this -- one is to connect us with future explorers of Mars, the stuff that inspired us and what will inspire them," said Louis D. Friedman, executive director of The Planetary Society. "We wanted to provide that connection. And secondly, we wanted to honor the interplay –-- as Carl said in his introduction on the disc-- the "dance between science and science fiction." They feed each other to make a creative process a lot greater."

Friedman came up with the idea when his friend Isaac Asimov died. "I began thinking -- how do we honor him?" Friedman recalled. "And it's not just him. It's what he represented. So then I thought -- why not honor three giants -- Asimov, Bradbury, and Clarke -- A,B,C -- and do it by sending their stories to Mars. Then I began discussing it with Carl and other people and it grew into this bigger idea, this notion of a science fiction anthology."

More at www.planetary.org