Europe-Russia Mission Joins US on Mars

A joint European-Russian mission aiming to search for traces of life on Mars blasted off Monday for the start of a seven-month unmanned space journey to the red planet.

A Proton rocket carrying the Trace Gas Orbiter to examine Mars's atmosphere and a descent module that will conduct a test landing on its surface.

The ExoMars 2016 mission, a collaboration between the European Space Agency, ESA and its Russian equivalent Roscosmos, is the first part of a two-phase exploration aiming to answer questions about the existence of life on Earth's neighbour.

LIFTOFF! #ExoMars Trace Gas orbiter & #Schiaparelli start a 500m km journey to the #RedPlanet @ESA_TGO & @ESA_EDM pic.twitter.com/pPWX2NRaY3

— ESA Operations (@esaoperations) March 14, 2016

The Trace Gas Orbiter will examine methane around Mars while a lander dubbed Schiaparelli will detach and descend to the surface of the fourth planet from the Sun.

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The landing of the module on Mars is designed as a trial run ahead of the planned second stage of the mission in 2018 that will see the first European rover land on the surface to drill for signs of life, although problems with financing mean it could be delayed.

"TGO will be like a big nose in space," said Jorge Vago, ExoMars project scientist.

Methane, the ESA said, is normally destroyed by ultraviolet radiation within a few hundred years, which implied that in Mars' case "it must still be produced today."

A better insight into water on Mars could aid scientists' understanding of how the Earth might cope in conditions of increased drought.

Although TGO's main science mission is scheduled to last until December 2017, it has enough fuel to continue operations for years after, if all goes well.

The ExoMars mission will complement the work of NASA's "Curiosity" rover which has spent more than three years on Mars as part of the Mars Science Laboratory mission.

Curiosity, a car-sized mobile laboratory, aims to gather soil and rock samples on Mars and analyze them "for organic compounds and environmental conditions that could have supported life now or in the past," according to NASA.