Spacecraft blasts off on mission to Mars

Published on Sunday 5 August 2007 00:43

A PROBE designed to find out if Mars can support life blasted off yesterday.

Phoenix, the latest Nasa mission to Mars, is due to land on the icy surface of the Red Planet's north pole. Scientists believe conditions in this region are the most likely to yield evidence of past or present life.

The spacecraft, which will reach Mars on May 25 after a journey of 422 million miles, is fitted with a robotic arm for scooping up samples of muddy, icy soil.

An onboard laboratory will heat up the samples and analyse the gases they give off.

Unlike the ill-fated British Beagle 2 probe, which vanished as it attempted to land on Mars on Christmas Day 2003, Phoenix is not equipped to find signs of life. It will look for evidence that the soil is capable of harbouring living organisms.

A Delta II rocket launched Phoenix into space from Cape Canaveral, Florida, yesterday. Barry Goldstein, Phoenix project manager at Nasa's jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, said: "Our attention after launch will be focused on flying the spacecraft to our selected landing site, preparing for surface operations and continuing our relentless examination and testing for the all-important descent and landing."

Recently the Nasa orbiter, Odyssey, discovered near-surface ice on the northern Martian plains.

"Our instruments are specially designed to find evidence for periodic melting of the ice and to assess whether this large region represents a habitable environment for Martian microbes," said Phoenix principal investigator Peter Smith, from the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Phoenix is the first of Nasa's Scout series of spacecraft, designed for low-cost missions to Mars. As well as testing the soil, it will take spectacular pictures with its stereo camera.