A spacecraft that will make the first attempt to touch and analyse water on Mars will blast off from Cape Canaveral in Florida today, on a mission to shed light on whether life has ever existed on the planet.

The Nasa Phoenix Mars Lander is scheduled to begin its nine-month journey at 10.36am BST, before touching down next year to spend three months drilling through the planet’s polar ice before the Martian winter sets in.

Its chief goal is to investigate whether ice near the Martian surface periodically melts – or has ever melted – sufficiently to create liquid water capable of sustaining primitive microbes.

Though the mission is run by the United States, British scientists have been heavily involved in designing many key instruments for the most sophisticated science package that has ever been sent to Mars.

The solar-powered craft has a 2.35m (7ft 8in) robotic arm that will push vertically into the soil, to reach grains from the icy crust just beneath the surface, which can then be picked up for scientific analysis. These will be examined for traces of water and carbon-based chemicals, which are considered essential building blocks for life, and images will be taken with optical and atomic force microscopes. Together, these instruments will provide the highest resolution imaging ever accomplished on another planet.

Tom Pike, of Imperial College, London, whose team has built the surfaces on which the samples will be analysed, said: “Nobody has looked at Mars at this type of resolution before. It is very difficult to predict what we might find, but if you wanted to look for signs of the earliest forms of past or present life we will be the first to look closely enough.”

Phoenix was originally scheduled to be launched yesterday, but it was put back by 24 hours because of bad weather. There is a second launch opportunity at 11.02am BST, and the launch window will extend until August 24 if necessary.

Barry Goldstein, Phoenix project manager at the Nasa Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said: “We have worked for four years to get to this point, so we are all very excited. Our attention after launch will be focused on flying the spacecraft to our selected landing site, preparing for surface operations, and continuing our relentless examination and testing for the all-important descent and landing on May 25 of next year.”

The probe, which is not mobile like the Spirit and Opportunity rovers that are still exploring Mars more than three years after they landed, will land at Vastitas Borealis, near the Martian north pole. The landing site is at the equivalent latitude of northern Alaska, and was chosen for its flatness.

Phoenix will also monitor the polar weather and the interaction of the Martian atmosphere and surface. David Catling, of the University of Bristol, who is involved in this research, said: “The polar atmosphere during summer is a different environment compared to that visited by previous landers. The sun is always above the horizon and so heats the surface and atmosphere throughout the day.

“As a consequence the polar summertime atmosphere is not subject to the huge daily temperature swings that are experienced at lower latitudes. Northern summer is also the time of year when water vapour is driven off ice at Mars’s north polar cap and enters the atmosphere.

“In studying the movement and behaviour of water on present-day Mars, we can better understand how it may have behaved previously.

“In the past, Mars experienced big ice ages when water ice extended into the tropics and probably melted in some places, providing possible habitats for life.”

Professor Keith Mason, chief executive of the Science and Technology Facilities Council, which is supporting British involvement in the mission, said: “Even though Mars has rovers on its surface and satellites remote-sensing it from orbit, it continues to intrigue and amaze us.

“By landing on the northern plains, Phoenix will give us an insight into the icy world beneath, furthering our quest to find out whether conditions exist for past or present life on Mars.”

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