A super-size rover, the biggest, best equipped robot ever sent to explore another planet, is zooming towards Mars on an eight and a half-month, 354 million-mile journey.
Nasa's six-wheeled, one-armed wonder, Curiosity, will reach Mars next summer and use its jackhammer drill, rock-zapping laser machine and other devices to search for evidence that Earth's next-door neighbour might once have been home to the teeniest forms of life.
More than 13,000 invited guests jammed Florida's Kennedy Space Centre yesterday to witness Nasa's first launch to Mars in four years, and the first flight of a Martian rover in eight years.
Nasa astrobiologist Pan Conrad, whose carbon compound-seeking instrument is on the rover, wore a bright blue, short-sleeve blouse emblazoned with rockets, planets and the words "Next stop Mars!"
She jumped, cheered and snapped pictures as the Atlas V rocket blasted off, as did Los Alamos National Laboratory's Roger Wiens, a planetary scientist in charge of Curiosity's laser blaster, called ChemCam.
Surrounded by 50 US and French members of his team, Mr Wiens shouted "Go, Go, Go!" as the rocket soared into a cloudy sky. "It was beautiful," he later observed, just as Nasa declared the launch a full success.
The one-ton Curiosity - 10ft long, 9ft wide and 7ft tall at its mast - is a mobile, nuclear-powered laboratory holding 10 science instruments that will sample Martian soil and rocks, and with unprecedented skill, analyse them on the spot.
It is as big as a car, but Nasa's Mars exploration programme director Doug McCuistion calls it "the monster truck of Mars".
"It's an enormous mission. It's equivalent of three missions, frankly, and quite an undertaking," he said. "Science fiction is now science fact. We're flying to Mars. We'll get it on the ground and see what we find."
The primary goal of the £1.6 billion mission is to see whether cold, dry, barren Mars might have been hospitable for microbial life once upon a time - or might even still be conducive to life now. No actual life detectors are on board; rather, the instruments will hunt for organic compounds.
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