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The Imagine Mars Project builds on the success of the Mars Millennium Project, an arts, science, and technology education initiative developed for the "turn of the millennium" celebrations of 1999-2000. It focused on one basic mission: inspire young people to imagine and design a livable community for 100 people on the planet Mars in the year 2030. An official project of the White House Millennium Council, the principal sponsors were: the National Endowment for the Arts, the U.S. Department of Education, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration/Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and The J. Paul Getty Trust. The Mars Millennium Project earned the support of more than 150 cooperating organizations, and the US Post Office sponsored the delivery of related Mars educational materials to schools nationwide.
When the project concluded at the beginning of the new century, it had exceeded all expectations in demonstrating the creativity that could be unleashed through an interdisciplinary educational program. Hundreds of thousands of students from around the country launched rockets, painted murals, composed operas, built architectural models, and engaged in countless other activities to celebrate and describe their vision of the future. Due to its success and popular requests for the project's continuation, NASA's Mars Public Engagement Program (managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and the National Endowment for the Arts reformulated the initiative under a new name, the Imagine Mars Project, so that it could continue to engage future generations of students.
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