The European orbiter Mars Express is to be hoisted aloft by a Soyuz-Fregat launcher from Russia's space base at Baikonur, in Kazakhstan, with lift-off timed for 1745 GMT, Russian space officials in Moscow said.

All being well, the unmanned spacecraft will hurtle across 400 million kilometers (250 million miles) of space, taking up station off Mars just before Christmas, its seven cameras, radars and spectrometers ready to scour the planet's surface from orbit.

The venture, Europe's first attempt at a solo exploration of another planet, has been worked out by several European research centres in collaboration with Russian scientists and space technicians.

Its first stages will take place on the vast empty steppes of Kazakhstan at a base where -- Russian media noted with some satisfaction -- the Soviet Union created its first cosmodrome 48 years ago to the day.

Once in orbit around the Red Planet, the Mars Express will launch a miniature lab which will descend to the equatorial region of the Isidis Basin, to test the Martian soil.

The 55-million-dollar (46-billion-euro) stationary lander -- its round shape recalling "a tiny garden barbecue," in the words of one of its inventors -- has been named Beagle-2, in honour of the sailing ship that took Charles Darwin on his epic voyage into the origins of life.

Scientists hope that its lander's findings could, like the data Darwin brought back from the remote Galapagos islands, revolutionise man's understanding of his place in the universe by detecting signs of life on Mars, a notion that has haunted men's imagination for centuries.

The Beagle-2, seen in simulated images bouncing on the Martian surface like a large football, contains a package of sophisticated instruments, a pair of stereoscopic cameras, a solar power pack and a "mole" robot that can inch along the Martian surface, or drill a metre or more below it, to sample the soil.

The Mars Express will be followed by two vastly better-funded US missions, one scheduled for June 8 and the other provisionally due to lift off on June 25, also aiming to settle once and for all the question of whether life exists, or has ever existed on Mars.

They will be joined by a Japanese mission launched in 1998, the Nozomi, which after getting lost due to technical mishaps is due to arrive next year.

All four missions are taking advantage of the fact that in August Earth and Mars will be in opposition -- at their closest points.

For the moment however, the Beagle-2 is hogging the limelight, its profile raised by the presence on board of a spot painting by the British artist Damien Hirst -- to serve as a colour calibration chart for its cameras -- and a call-sign composed by the British pop group Blur.

By pressing ahead with the Mars Express, the European Space Agency is taking a gamble that small, quick, cheap missions can contribute usefully to space research.

The strategy has its critics who say that it can cut too many corners in design and testing compared with bigger, lavishly-funded long-term projects.

SPACE.WIRE