An unmanned Soyuz rocket blasted off at 11:45 pm (1745 GMT) from the Russian space base in Baikonur in the Central Asian republic, on board the Mars lander named "Beagle 2", which is scheduled to descend to Mars on Christmas Day after making a nearly seven-month voyage to the red planet.

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

Scientists hope the 55-million dollar (46-million euro) lander -- named after the ship that took Charles Darwin on a search for the origins of life -- will come across signs of life on Mars, a notion which has inspired human beings for centuries.

SPACE.WIRE