A Space probe designed in Oxfordshire blasted off on June 2 in search of life on Mars.

Beagle 2, named after the ship which carried 19th century naturalist Charles Darwin around the world, was launched at 6.45pm, aboard the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft.

The 70kg probe was built by scientists from Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Chilton, near Didcot, who watched the launch on a live video link.

It is due to land on Mars on Christmas Day, where it will look for water and signs of life. A song recorded by pop group Blur will be broadcast back to Earth to signal its safe arrival.

Controversial artist Damien Hirst has created a palette of coloured dots which the spacecraft's computer will use to check against colours from Mars' surface that are picked up on its cameras.

The launch took place from Baikonur, in the central Asian state of Kazakhstan, and was a key milestone for the 50 Oxfordshire-based scientists who had been preparing for the mission for more than five years.

As well as building the Beagle 2 landing craft, which will emerge from casing shaped like a solitaire gemstone to collect samples on the Red Planet's surface, they also helped design Aspera, a device that will orbit the planet looking for signs of water that may have been evaporated by the solar wind.

Prof Manuel Grande, of the laboratory's planets and space plasma group, hailed the launch as a success.

He was confident that, with luck on its side, the mission would uncover signs of life -- or at least extinct species.

He said: "On Mars you have to have luck on your side. Even if we landed a probe in the Antarctic, we'd only have a one in three chance of finding life.

"Mars is like a younger brother of the Earth. The things that have gone right on Earth haven't gone terribly differently on Mars. It's just a bit smaller and a bit colder. In a couple of hundred years' time, people will probably be living on Mars -- but I'm not planning on it for my retirement home."

Ever since Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli spotted what were then believed to be the remains of canals in 1877, intense speculation about the possibility of intelligent life existing on Mars.

In August 1996, US scientists announced they had found traces of fossilised bacteria in a Martian meteorite.

Gerry Anderson, 74, the creator of the TV puppet series Thunderbirds, was the guest of honour at the laboratory to see the launch. Fortunately, the International Rescue characters he created, such as Brains and Virgil, were not needed on the night.

Mr Anderson, who lives near Henley, recalled waiting excitedly in the 1960s for America's manned missions to the Moon, adding that, in those days, he never dreamed it would be possible to build a Martian lander.

He said: "It's great that it has happened in this country and even greater that it's happened in Oxfordshire."

The project has cost at least £30m, with some of the funding coming from industry and the Government.

After the hitch-free launch, Mr Anderson awarded prizes for the best schoolchildren's Mars poster designs to Alice Jackson, eight, of Wantage Primary School, and Ben Elwood and Mitchell Thomas, both 10, of Millbrook Junior School, Grove.