THE most sophisticated spacecraft ever sent to Mars was on its way last night to continue the search for life on the Red Planet.

An Atlas 5 rocket carrying Nasa’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) blasted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida at 12.43 BST yesterday after two days of delays caused by minor technical concerns and bad weather.

When the probe arrives in orbit around the planet next year, it will collect more data than all the previous missions to Mars put together. It boasts the most advanced cameras sent to another planet.

MRO aims to answer the continuing mystery of how, when and why the Red Planet’s once warm and wet climate changed to create the desert world that exists today, as well as helping scientists to select the best sites for future landers that might find evidence of past or present life.

There could be a bonus for Britain. The mission could solve the riddle of what happened to the British Beagle 2 lander, and other failed missions to the surface such as Nasa’s Mars Polar Lander. MRO’s cameras should be capable of finding their last resting places.

The successful launch came as a relief to a team of British scientists who designed an instrument aboard MRO that has already come to grief twice on previous attempts to reach Mars.

The Mars Climate Sounder instrument was first attached to the Mars Observer probe, which lost contact with Earth in 1992 when one of its engines blew up.

In 1999, Nasa loaded a second Mars Climate Sounder — made from spare parts from the first one — on to its Mars Climate Orbiter, but this crashed into the planet after engineers mixed up metric and imperial units.

Scientists have now updated and redesigned the instrument for MRO, which should reach Mars in March next year. The Climate Sounder will act as a Martian weather satellite, mapping and measuring temperatures, clouds and dust in the thin Martian atmosphere to make accurate forecasts possible.

It is one of seven instruments aboard the MRO. These include three specialised cameras, ground-penetrating radar and a spectrometer for identifying mineral patches as small as a tennis court on the ground.

“Every time we look with increased resolution, Mars has said, ‘Here’s something you didn’t expect. You don’t understand me yet’,” said Richard Zurek of Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

“We’re sure to find surprises.”

Douglas McCuistion, director of Nasa’s Mars exploration programme, said that MRO’s findings would help the agency to decide where to send the Mars Science Laboratory rover mission planned for 2009.

“We expect to use this spacecraft’s eyes in the sky in coming years as our primary tools to identify and evaluate the best places for future missions to land,” he said.

When MRO arrives at Mars it will spend its first six months dipping into the planet’s atmosphere to slow itself down, a process known as aerobraking.

It will begin two years of science operations in November 2006, but has enough fuel to last for another five years if it can still be useful.

Nasa plans to use it as a communications relay satellite for the Mars Science Laboratory mission.

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