A Russian probe on Wednesday blasted off on a three year return mission to Mars that aims to bring the first sample of the Martian moon Phobos back to Earth, the Russian space agency said.

The Phobos-Grunt probe blasted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on a Zenit-2SB rocket at 0016 (2016 GMT Tuesday) in what Russia hopes will be its first successful planetary mission since the collapse of the Soviet Union, a live transmission from Roscosmos showed.