Nasa's Mars mission blasts off
The Phoenix spacecraft is expected to land on Mars next May
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Saturday, 04, Aug 2007 08:17
A space mission to determine whether conditions exist to support life on Mars was launched today.
The Phoenix spacecraft left the US space base Cape Canaveral, in Florida, attached to a Delta II rocket, at 05:26 local time (10:26 BST).
It will travel 422 million miles on its journey to Mars, where its mission is to determine whether the icy soil on the planet's northern region is capable of supporting life.
The launch of Nasa's latest mission to Mars comes after an unsuccessful British mission to the red planet which had sought to seek out signs of life there.
But unlike the Beagle 2 probe, which vanished as it attempted to land on Mars on Christmas Day 2003, Phoenix will not be looking for evidence of past or present life on the planet.
Instead the spacecraft will use a special 7.5ft robotic arm to dig through soil thought to be covering a layer of water ice on Mars' north pole, in order to determine whether conditions there are favourable to life.
"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's principal investigator Peter Smith, of the University of Arizona in Texas.
Commenting ahead of today's launch he explained that the Phoenix mission was aimed at investigating the discovery of near-surface ice on Mars' northern plains by Nasa's current Odyssey mission.
Phoenix, which will use on board scientific instruments to analyse the samples it retrieves, is due to land on Mars on May 25th 2008.