The biggest and most advanced robotic rover ever heads to Mars on Saturday on a mission to hunt for inhabitable environments. EPA/BGNES
NASA has launched a unique Mars rover, Curiosity, on Saturday to search for traces of life on the Red Planet.
"Today's launch caps a very smooth countdown and generally cooperative weather at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's Space Launch Complex 41," NASA said Saturday.
The 1-ton rover is the centerpiece of NASA's USD 2.5 B Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission.
The rover is to spend two Earth years on the surface of Mars searching for evidence of the elements of life and factors such as surface radiation that can limit life.
The car-size Curiosity rover blasted off atop its Atlas 5 rocket at 10:02 a.m. Eastern Time Saturday, streaking into a cloudy sky above Cape Canaveral Air Force Station here.
The huge robot's next stop is Mars, though the 354-million-mile (570-million-kilometer) journey will take eight and a half months.
Joy Crisp a deputy project scientist for the rover at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., called the liftoff "spectacular."
"This feels great," she said as she watched the rocket lift off from Cape Canaveral, as cited by MSNBC.
Pamela Conrad, deputy principal investigator for the mission at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said, "Every milestone feels like such a relief. It's a beautiful day. The sun's out, and all these people came out to watch."
The work Curiosity does when it finally arrives should revolutionize our understanding of the Red Planet and pave the way for future efforts to hunt for potential Martian life, researchers said.
"It is absolutely a feat of engineering, and it will bring science like nobody's ever expected," Doug McCuistion, head of NASA's Mars exploration program, said of Curiosity. "I can't even imagine the discoveries that we're going to come up with."