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.

At 0630 GMT, there should be the first chance for it to send a sign of life, sending back a picture of its surroundings, data about the martian wind or a radio callsign composed by the British pop band Blur.

"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 cripple the delicate electronics of satellites and spacecraft.

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

ESA officials said a 30-percent power loss suffered by Mars Express after its June 2 launch from Baikonur, Kazakhstan, 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 as far as 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 have been found to contain carbon compounds that, for some, shows that there was the potential for bacterial life in the planet's distant past.

"For 5,000 years, people have looked at Mars and wondered if there is life there and it falls to this generation to do it. We would kick ourselves if we didn't do it," Colin Pillinger, a professor at Britain's Open University and lead scientist behind Beagle 2, told AFP.

"The question that is uppermost in my mind is, 'Are we alone in the Universe?' Finding that we are not alone in respect of our Solar System would mean to me that the Universe is teeming with life.

"The only way you could go farther than this is how did life originate, how did inorganic, non-living things suddenly become living? Well if you find two life (forms), you've got two to compare and contrast, and you'll learn an awful lot more about it than from just one."

The experiments are due to last at least six months. Pillinger said his team hoped to draw some preliminary conclusions from the data stream by March.

The Mars Express/Beagle 2 project, costing a frugal 260 million eurosmillion dollars) or thereabouts, is the first time that Europe has conducted a solo mission to Mars.

Two roving US laboratories are due to arrive on Mars around January 4 and January 24 next year.

"It's more a complementarity -- there is cooperation, no competition (with the Americans) and we are doing things differently from them," Southwood said.

"I think, though, there is a bit of sensitivity on the American side because they are not used to having anyone else there. They used to compete with the Russians and suddenly they see there's a new boy on the block."

SPACE.WIRE