To cheers from scientists in Britain and Germany, a European spacecraft the size of a large washing machine detached a package the size of a home barbecue yesterday and sent it spinning gently on a five-day journey towards Mars at 12,500mph. On board were a parachute, a set of airbags, a heatshield, a camera, a drill, a torch, a Damien Hirst painting, music by Blur, a set of solar panels and an oven capable of heating rock to 1,000 C – powered by a source just big enough to light up a 60 watt bulb.

It may look like a garden barbecue, or a giant pocket watch. But it is, in fact, a space probe – on Christmas Day it will land on Mars and start exploring. Here, Colin Pillinger, the British scientist behind this shoestring project, tells the story of the Beagle 2.

It’s a space lander the size of a portable barbecue, stapled to a mothership not much bigger than a household refrigerator, and it’s about to make history. On June 2 – the date could slip, but not by much – Beagle 2 will leave Kazakhstan aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket and begin a journey of 400m km. Mars Express will be the first European mission to reach another planet and Beagle 2 will be the first British lander to unfold under extraterrestrial skies. The first carries ground-penetrating radar that will “feel” deep below the surface of a freezing, arid, hostile planet and the second a little mole that will explore the surface and even burrow a metre below it. Between them, they might answer one of the great questions of the past 300 years: is there, or was there, life on Mars?

A European spacecraft bound for Mars in June will “feel” miles below the surface of the red planet for ice and water. It will also launch a little British lander, roughly the size of a backyard barbecue, which will bounce down just north of the equator and burrow into the Martian topsoil in search of chemical evidence of life.