Rocket on mission to seek life on Mars

Two robotic spacecraft began a seven-month journey to Mars on Monday as part of a European-Russian unmanned space mission to sniff out leads to life on the Red Planet.

Russia's Proton rocket, carrying the Trace Gas Orbiter and the Schiaparelli landing demonstrator, launched into an overcast sky at the Russian-operated Baikonur cosmodrome in the Kazakh steppe, the Russian space agency Roscosmos and the European Space Agency said.

Roscosmos said the launch had taken place "successfully".

ExoMars 2016, a collaboration between ESA and Roscosmos, is the first part of a two-phase exploration aiming to answer questions about the existence of life on Mars.

The ESA has said the aim was to determine "whether Mars is 'alive'".

The spacecraft are expected to arrive at the Red Planet in October after a journey of 496 million kilometers.

TGO will photograph the Red Planet and analyze its air, splitting off from the Mars lander Schiaparelli days before entering Mars' atmosphere. One key goal is to analyze methane, a gas which on Earth is created in large part by living microbes, and traces of which were observed by previous Mars missions.

"TGO will be like a big nose in space," said Jorge Vago, ExoMars project scientist.

Methane, the ESA said, is normally destroyed by ultraviolet radiation within a few hundred years, which implied that in Mars' case "it must still be produced today".

TGO will analyze Mars' methane in more detail than any previous mission, said ESA, in order to try and determine its likely origin.

Schiaparelli - named after a 19th century Italian astronomer - will in turn spend several days measuring climatic conditions on the Red Planet including seasonal dust storms and pave the way for the later arrival of a planned Mars rover.

Space has been one of the few areas of cooperation between Moscow and the West that has not been damaged by geopolitical tensions stemming from the crises in Ukraine and Syria.

However, the second phase, the Mars rover due for launch in 2018, seems likely to be delayed over financial concerns.