NASA officials have just launched the MAZVEN spacecraft off the unmanned Atlas V space rocket Monday, Nov. 18 at 1:28 p.m. EST. It blasted off the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and began its mission to Mars.

“Go Atlas. Go Centaur. Go MAVEN,” Mission Control said, mere seconds before the rocket soared into blue skies dotted with wispy clouds over the launch pad.

The MAVEN mission will be to study the outer upper atmosphere of the solar system’s fourth planet. According to evidence from previous explorations, Mars was a warm and wet planet in its first billion years of existence. Scientists are hoping MAVEN will be able to shed light on why that ended and became the cold and dry planet scientists see today.

Theories point to Mars having a thick, warm atmosphere capable of holding moisture and possibly microbial life eons ago. That has since changed, as the atmosphere left into space, possibly eroded by the sun.

“Something clearly happened,” the University of Colorado’s Bruce Jakosky, the principal Maven scientist, said on the eve of Maven’s flight. “What we want to do is to understand what are the reasons for that change in the climate.”

The mission received warm wishes from colleagues just as the NASA officials gave the “go” ahead to signal the news Martian explorer’s readiness.

“From the International Space Station, best wishes for a fabulous mission,” said flight engineer Mike Hopkins from aboard the orbiting space base in the minutes before the launch.

The acronym MAVEN stands for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, with a capital “N” in EvolutioN. The mission costs $671 million. MAVEN will travel 10 months before reaching the red planet. It is planned to reach orbit in September 2014.

This mission marks the 21^st shot NASA has had at Mars, with 14 of them proving successful. That’s a U.S. success rate of 70 percent, by far the highest success rate of any country to date. The most recent mission, the Curiosity rover, did successfully land in 2012, after launching in 2011.

All 21 missions have been sent with an underlying goal being to understand whether life ever existed on Mars, if so, can it exist now, or has the planet always and will always be barren.

“We don’t have that answer yet, and that’s all part of our quest for trying to answer, ‘Are we alone in the universe?’ in a much broader sense,” said John Grunsfeld, NASA’s science mission director.