Behind the scenes: MAVEN takes cross-country trip

NASA's next Mars probe moved to its Florida launch site Friday, nearly ready to depart Earth in November on a 10-month journey to the red planet.

The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, mission is scheduled to launch Nov. 18 on an Atlas 5 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla.

The MAVEN spacecraft, weighing nearly a ton, was transported from its Lockheed Martin factory near Denver to the Kennedy Space Center aboard a U.S. Air Force C-17 cargo plane. MAVEN was housed inside an 18-foot-tall container built in the 1990s to haul sensitive interplanetary probes built by Lockheed Martin.

The 12,400-pound load, including MAVEN and its metal box, was carefully driven over roads from Lockheed Martin's facility to Buckley Air Force Base, then loaded into the C-17 transport plane for the three-hour flight to Florida. Once at KSC, engineers unloaded MAVEN and hauled it to the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility in the space center's industrial area.

On Saturday, workers removed the lid of the shipping container, then lifted a protective "birdcage" from around the spacecraft to reveal MAVEN inside the clean room.

MAVEN's mission is to study the Martian upper atmosphere to determine how Mars transitioned from a warmer, wetter world into the desert planet we know today.

We tagged along on MAVEN's journey from Colorado to Florida.

See our Mission Status Center for an account of the cross-country shipment.

Photo credit: Stephen Clark/Spaceflight Now