Who will be first to be enlisted as slaves upon the arrival of our Martian Overlords.

Let's just hope they're not offended by any of the 'art' either.

"the names of more than a quarter million Earthlings."

I think we have just tracked down one of the missing government data disks then.

It looks like the colours have been altered on the picture with the flag and dvd. It's as if they have added more red to it, as that's what people would expect to see.

I read somewhere that one mission controller on the Pathfinder mission (I think) said they would have clear blue skies for the landing. What's the deal there then?

WHAT IS NASA HIDING FROM US?!

The truth is out there.

Surely the HMRC could have let them have a CD with a lot more than that on!

Shouldn't that be "Earth creatures" ?

Where's the kaboom...?

Great, now there's a "Millions" CD being offered to aliens. Baton down the hatches for when the intergalactic spam runs begin... although it should make for some interesting p0rn.

It's probably region-coded.

Using the joke alert icon this time, just in case...

Due to Rayleigh scattering (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raleigh_scattering), the Martian sky must be blue. If you colour correct stock NASA imagery for the planet, the terrain looks much less 'alien' and indeed looks a lot like similar deserts on Earth, e.g. Arizona. Nasa has always racked up the red on their Martian pics for some unexplicable reason.

Mines the penguin coz it's cold and there's a lot of water there for them to swim in.

it's all a hoax it never really went there..bush gave the money to hilary to pay for the election . next we'll have transmitted live from area 51

i know this is a great leap forward for mankind and all that, but when i read the article, the only thing that stuck in my mind was the fact that the manager of the mars exploration program at NASA is called 'fuk li'