May 26, 2003	Monday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 23,1424

BAIKONUR: Deep in the sunbaked steppe of Kazakhstan, Russian rocket technicians are due shortly to launch the countdown to the European Space Agency’s epic maiden voyage to another planet.

On June 2, a Soyuz-Fregat rocket will blast off at the Baikonur space centre, propelling the 1.2-ton Mars Express probe on its 55-million-kilometre journey to the Red Planet.

The main objective is to search for sub-surface water from orbit and drop a lander on the Martian surface for closer examination.

But beyond gathering vital intelligence, a successful mission will firmly establish Europe and its space agency ESA as a new player in interplanetary exploration.

“This is a landmark in the agency’s history,” said Alain Fournier- Sicre, ESA’s chief representative in Russia.

Travelling at 10,800 kilometres per hour after it separates from the rocket, the craft should reach Mars in less than six months.

The timing of the departure is crucial because in August Mars will make its closest approach to Earth for 17 years. By launching slightly earlier, the probe can take the shortest route to the planet, arriving in the least amount of time and using the least fuel.

Scientific instruments on the orbiting spacecraft will perform a series of remote sensing experiments designed to shed new light on the Martian atmosphere, the planet’s structure and geology, while work by the lander should provide a better picture of its mysterious past.

“This mission is about the surface, water and life,” said ESA scientist Augustin Chicarro during a recent visit to Baikonur, where some 50 ESA personnel for months worked feverishly to prepare the probe.

“We know that there was once much water on Mars,” he said. The mission will now try to establish whether any life developed before the planet’s surface dried up.

“The results of the Mars mission will keep science busy for at least ten years,” Chicarro predicts.

Meanwhile, the Russian launch specialists are confident that everything will go smoothly on the day after the mighty engines of the Soyuz ignite.

“This is tried-and-tested technology,” said Alexei Vasiliev, head of launches at pad No.6, which has seen 346 launches of manned and unmanned Soyuz rockets in the past four decades.

But he is sure to offer a silent prayer that there will be no repeat of the Mars-96 disaster, when Russia’s own probe was lost in the early stages due to an engine malfunction on the Proton carrier rocket.

The disaster not only crippled Russian interplanetary hopes, but hit hard the budgets of several European countries. Germany, France and Finland alone spent around 200 million dollars on the doomed project.

This time ESA’s probe will ride on a different type of Russian rocket, but the lesson remains: space exploration can and does go wrong at great cost. Further reminders of this came in 1998 and 1999 when the US space agency NASA lost two successive Mars probes.

The European project came together in less than four years, earning it the name Mars Express. Costing around 300 million euro in total, it is “the cheapest mission to Mars so far,” according to the Astrium space company that did much of the construction.

The spacecraft and its instruments represent a truly international endeavour - a stereoscopic camera from Germany, a geological mapping device from France and an atmospheric sounder from Italy.

The radar instrument, to probe for water at depths of a few kilometres below the surface, was built jointly by Italy and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

The Beagle 2 landing craft, named after the ship in which Charles Darwin set sail to explore unchartered areas of the Earth in 1831, was designed and built in Britain.

Five days before the probe goes into a polar orbit around the planet, the lander will separate and descend to the surface where it is to take photographs and take and analyse samples in temperatures as low as minus 100 degrees Celsius.

Its tasks should be accomplished within half a year before the Martian dust threatens to affect measuring devices.

As well as its science objectives, Mars Express will also provide relay communication services between the Earth and landers deployed on the surface by other nations, thus forming a centre piece of the international effort in Mars exploration.—dpa