The first of a pair of robots is ready to launch from Cape Canaveral on Sunday, joining a scientific armada headed for Mars in an international effort to determine if life exists or ever existed on Earth's neighbor.

The first of two Mars Expedition Rovers, robots about the size of riding lawn mowers, sat atop a Delta 2 rocket scheduled for launch at 2:05 p.m. EDT on Sunday.

Its twin is scheduled for launch on June 25. They join Japanese and European satellites on their way to the red planet and two NASA satellites already orbiting Mars.

All the activity takes advantage of a rare proximity between the planets that has cut the normal travel time from the usual nine to 10 months to just seven months for missions launched this year.

The two rovers, with a combined price tag of $800 million, are the most sophisticated robots ever sent to another planet. They will land on opposite sides of the planet and have few limitations on where they can travel and what they can study.

"The present Mars exploration program represents the most extensive scientific assault of any heavenly body since the Apollo era," Orlando Figueroa, NASA's Mars exploration program director, told reporters on Saturday.

LOOKING FOR WATER

Water is the sole objective of the mission.

Earlier missions have determined Mars was once awash in it, but the rovers were designed to determine whether that water was present long enough to support life.

"Where's there's life on Earth, you'll find water, and no matter where you find water, you'll find life," said Ed Weiler, NASA's top space scientist.

Evidence of life on Earth has been found in boiling sulfur pools, in Antarctic ice and at the dark bottom of oceans, Weiler said, but only because water has had some permanency on Earth.

The first rover is headed for the Gusev Crater, a large impact crater just south of the Martian equator that might once have held a lake. A valley that cuts through the crater's rim could have been caused by water flowing out.

The rover could find sediment, or rocks that appear to be eroded by water or moved from one place to another by water.

"We see a jigsaw puzzle that's unsolved in front of us. What we will do is use the rocks and soils and the analyzes of them to fill in this jigsaw puzzle," said Cathy Weitz, the lead scientist for the rovers.

The rovers will land nestled inside a configuration of bouncing balloons first used in the Mars Pathfinder mission, which caused a media sensation with television images of the rocky landscape.

Since then, a pair of high-profile failures forced NASA to redesign its Mars program top to bottom, and the agency now counts on the rover twins to reestablish its credibility.

NASA lost one 1998 mission because the agency failed to take into account that some calibrations had been made in metric, some in English standard. A second mission launched in 1998 simply disappeared into the Martian atmosphere.

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