The robotic Phoenix Mars Lander, a joint product of the Canadian Space Agency and NASA, began its nine-month journey to Mars Saturday to determine if the red planet can support life.

Strapped aboard an unmanned Delta rocket, the dirt and ice digger made a pre-dawn launch at Cape Canaveral, Fla. armed with a Canadian meteorological package.

Canadian researchers, engineers and scientists from across the country developed the weather station, which is designed to analyze the planet's atmosphere to help determine if Mars can sustain life.

"This will be a very exciting mission from the Canadian perspective," York University astronomy professor Paul Delaney told CTV Newsnet on Saturday.

"This is going to be the first mission in over 30 years, since Project Viking back in the 70s, where we are very deliberately looking for organic material and the definitive sings of life," Delaney said.

The space probe is expected to touch down on Martian Arctic plains on May 25, 2008. It will spend three to six months scooping up soil and ice, and analyzing the samples.

"We need to understand the planet as a whole, both beneath the lander's feet and what is happening above the ground and in its atmosphere. We want to know its temperature profile, we want to know the wind characteristics, we want to know the atmospheric pressure," Delaney said.

University of Alberta professor Carlos Lange is the creator of the wind-sensor instrument aboard the robotic device that will register the direction and speed of the wind on the planet.

"The whole meteorological station and the sample delivered depends on us understanding the winds that happen on the lander," Lange told CTV Newsnet on Saturday from Cape Canaveral, Fla.

Lange explained the inspiration for the thread-based instrument came from the sea rather than the air.

"It's what sailors use to gauge the wind in their sails. I got the idea from there but the problem on Mars is that the atmosphere is very thin and the force of the wind is very weak," Lange said.

The challenge was to design something that was light, flexible and would still survive the 680-million-kilometre journey and temperatures 100 degrees below zero.

"Typical materials that would be strong enough to use on Mars would not move with the wind. At the same time, if we use very soft material, the UV radiation comes right to the surface because it doesn't have an ozone layer and those would become brittle and break."

Another of the Canadian-developed meteorological tools on board is the lidar, which works much the way sonar does.

"It's basically laser radar. The laser beam shoots into the atmosphere, the light reflects off the gases and particles that are in the atmosphere, reflects back down to the space probe and we are therefore able to analyze and profile the atmospheric composition. First time we have ever done it on Mars," Delaney explained.

NASA has never attempted to land a space craft at such a high altitude. If successful, it could pave the way for human visitors and possibly even future inhabitants.

With files from the Associated Press