The European Space Agency (ESA) spacecraft, Mars Express, is now 40 million kilometers (25 million miles) from Mars and on December 19 will release on schedule a small robot lab to search for signs of life on the martian surface, they said.

If all goes well, that lander, the British-built Beagle 2, will use parachutes and inflated bags to land on Mars at 0254 GMT on December 25, roughly nine days ahead of the expected arrival of the first of two American rivals.

"We survived the storm last week, we're through, although it was nerve-wracking," said ESA's director of science, David Southwood, referring to a gigantic solar flare disgorged by the Sun that was the biggest ever measured.

These storms, a disgorging of superheated particles that occurs as part of the 11-year cycle of solar activity, can be fatal for the delicate electronics of satellites and spacecraft.

"We're on target for Mars," Southwood told a press conference.

Other ESA officials said that a 30-percent power loss suffered by Mars Express after its launch from the Russian space pad at Baikonur, Kazakhstan, on June 2 on a 250-million-kilometer (156-million-mile) trip, would not make any substantial impact on goals.

"At the moment, we have something that is a near-norminal [normal] mission," said John Reddie, Mars Express' flight director.

Mars Express comprises an orbiter that will loop the planet, using sensors to map terrain and its minerology, analyse the planet's atmosphere and peer up to one kilometer (900 yards) beneath the surface using ground-penetrating radar.

Beagle 2, named in honour of the Beagle, the ship that took the pioneering British scientist Charles Darwin, on his voyage of discovery in 1830, is a small static lab, about the size of a round barbecue, which contains seven miniaturised tools to analyse the atmosphere and soil samples.

They are designed primarily to see whether water exists, or has existed on Mars, and whether there are the remains of carbon-based lifeforms on the surface.

Sketchy visual evidence, disputed in some quarters, suggests that Mars was once awash in oceans, only for it to lose the precious substance.

It may have boiled away into space or perhaps receded deep underground.

Meteorites knocked off the Martian surface and which have landed on Earth point to carbon compounds that, for some, show that there was the potential for bacterial life in the planet's distant past.

SPACE.WIRE