Cape Canaveral, Fla. ? When NASA’s newest Mars lander departs Earth this weekend, it will be carrying the words and art of visionaries from Voltaire to Carl Sagan.

The “Visions of Mars” mini-disk secured to the lander will be the first library on Mars – a gift from past and present dreamers to possible future settlers.

“I’m glad you’re there and I wish I was with you,” Sagan said in a recording made for the mission before his 1996 death. An excerpt from his book “Cosmos” is also on board.

Other musings, in written and audio format, come from Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Percival Lowell and Kim Stanley Robinson.

“For any science fiction writer,” Robinson said Friday on the eve of launch, “it’s really a thrill.” “Green Mars,” the second novel in his classic trilogy, is on the disk.

The Phoenix Mars Lander was scheduled to blast off before sunrise today aboard an unmanned rocket. Its journey to Mars will take nearly 10 months and cover 422 million miles.

NASA is aiming for a landing within Mars’ Arctic Circle next May. The three-legged Phoenix is equipped with a long digger that will penetrate the red soil and underlying ice, and tiny ovens that will bake dirt and ice samples.

If any traces of organic compounds are found, it could indicate an environment conducive to life. Previous Mars missions have pointed to liquid water in the long-ago past, already raising the possibility of life.

That’s what red planet enthusiasts have been envisioning for decades – life on Mars, both native and human. Robinson foresees permanent Martian colonies with hundreds and even thousands of people within 100 years, similar to the Antarctic stations.

“I believe in it. I think it’s coming,” Robinson said.

The Planetary Society’s silica-glass DVD, just 3 inches in diameter, contains Asimov’s “I’m in Marsport without Hilda” and “The Martian Way,” Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles,” Arthur C. Clarke’s “Transit of Earth” and “The Sands of Mars,” Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels,” Alexei Tolstoi’s “Aelita,” Voltaire’s “Micromegas” and an excerpt from Kurt Vonnegut’s “The Sirens of Titan.”

In all, 84 written texts are on the disk, as well as 63 Mars-related works of art and three radio broadcasts, including the 1938 recreation of H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds” and the 1940 discussion between Wells and Orson Welles, who directed the panic-inducing drama.