MAVEN is 100 days from launch, and the $671 million mission is on budget and on schedule. Read our full story.

Engineers removed opened the transportation canister from around the MAVEN spacecraft Saturday, exposing the Mars-bound probe inside a clean room at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Clad in sky blue bunny suits, workers from NASA and Lockheed Martin raised the lid from MAVEN's 18-foot-tall container before moving the spacecraft inside the clean room that will be the orbiter's home for the next three months.

Then the team lifted an apparatus known as the "birdcage" from around MAVEN, before hoisting the spacecraft onto a rotation fixture.

Check out photos of MAVEN's move from Colorado to Florida, including Saturday's activites in the clean room.

Workers have removed the MAVEN spacecraft inside its shipping container from the C-17 airplane, and technicians are readying to move the probe to the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at the Kennedy Space Center.

Inside the clean room Saturday, workers will remove the lid of the box and cut off protective wrapping around MAVEN. Processing begins in earnest next week, leading to a launch date of Nov. 18.

The U.S. Air Force C-17 cargo plane carrying NASA's MAVEN spacecraft has arrived at the Kennedy Space Center's runway after today's journey from its factory in Colorado.

The C-17 landed at 7:56 p.m. EDT (2356 GMT) on Runway 15 at KSC's Shuttle Landing Facility.

The arrival of any spacecraft at its launch site is a major milestone, and it kicks off MAVEN's launch campaign ahead of its scheduled liftoff on a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket. Launch is set from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station for 1:28 p.m. EST (1828 GMT) on Nov. 18.

Nov. 18 is the opening of a 20-day launch period, when the relative location of Earth and Mars is such to allow a direct flight to the red planet.

Later this evening, workers will unload the MAVEN spacecraft in its shipping container from the C-17, place the orbiter on a truck and trailer, and transport it to the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at KSC. Over the next few months, technicians will install the craft's high-gain communications antenna, which was shipped to Florida separate from the main spacecraft, along with flight batteries and some scientific sensors that required rework.

Guy Beutelschies, MAVEN program manager at Lockheed Martin, which built the spacecraft, says engineers will go through deployment tests of MAVEN's solar arrays and instrument boom before filling the craft's tank with 3,600 pounds of propellant in October.

Then MAVEN will be encapsulated inside the Atlas 5's four-meter payload fairing before moving to Space Launch Complex 41 for attachment to the two-stage booster.

And we're off. We've boarded the C-17 cargo plane, joining MAVEN for a three-hour flight to Kennedy Space Center. We'll pause our coverage for the duration of the flight.

Making quick work of a carefully-choreographed loading procedure, engineers have placed the MAVEN spacecraft inside the Air Force C-17 cargo plane.

Using a winch and with the help of a half-dozen spotters, the Air Force loadmasters and Lockheed Martin workers loaded the spacecraft aboard the aircraft using a rear ramp.

The container holding MAVEN is about 18 feet tall, 14 feet wide and weighs about six tons. There are just a few feet to spare on each side of the box, with even less clearance above.

The container was previously used to transport NASA's Cassini spacecraft before it launched to Saturn, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Phoenix Mars lander, the Jupiter-bound Juno orbiter, and the GRAIL lunar satellites.

After engineers load MAVEN's environmental support equipment, we will be ready for takeoff to the Kennedy Space Center's Shuttle Landing Facility - a flight of about three-and-a-half hours.

Boarding will soon commence! NASA's MAVEN spacecraft is about to be loaded inside the cargo hold of the C-17 jumbo jet at Buckley Air Force Base outside Denver.

The move is meticulously planned and rehearsed, with specific and clear roles identified for everyone involved in transporting the spacecraft, which is the centerpiece of MAVEN's $671 million mission to study climate change on Mars.

MAVEN, inside its shipping box, is ready to be loaded inside the U.S. Air Force C-17 cargo plane. Photo credit: Stephen Clark/Spaceflight Now

MAVEN has arrived at Buckley Air Force Base on the east side of the Denver metro area after a 39-mile convoy from Lockheed Martin's factory, where the one-ton spacecraft was built and tested.

It traveled under escort from local police and arrived at Buckley just moments ago. An Air Force C-17 cargo plane sits on the tarmac ready to receive MAVEN and its shipping container.

The MAVEN spacecraft weighs just shy of 2,000 pounds without fuel. Once at the Kennedy Space Center, MAVEN will be filled with propellant and will have a launch mass of approximately 5,400 pounds.

Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN's principal investigator from the University of Colorado at Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, is along for the ride.

"We've been working on this for 10 years," Jakosky said. "At first, it was just a competition. Maybe seven of those years it was requirements, paperwork, proposals and reviews. And the last three years, it's been about cutting metal and assembling it."

MAVEN stands for the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission. It was selected by NASA in 2008, and the entire mission is projected to cost $671 million.

The mission will study the Martian upper atmosphere and try to learn how the red planet transitioned from a warmer, wetter world into the desert planet we know today.

"To walk in and see the spacecraft fully assembled, and to see it on the transporter ready to go down to Florida is mind-boggling. It's hard to believe we're here," Jakosky said.

Over the next couple of hours, workers will use a mobile crane to hoist the container holding MAVEN off its trailer and push the box into the C-17 on a ramp at the back end of the plane.

The MAVEN spacecraft is loaded inside its transport container on a flatbed trailer, and the one-ton spaceship has been pulled out its clean room at Lockheed Martin's satellite plant just outside of Denver.

The sensitive spacecraft, the centerpiece of a $453 million mission to probe the Martian atmosphere, will be continuously purged with pure nitrogen to keep the environment inside the container clean. The transport team, comprised of Lockheed Martin, NASA, and University of Colorado officials, says the temperature inside the box is about 70 degrees Fahrenheit with a humidity of less than 30 percent.

Those parameters are acceptable for shipment.

The box measures about 14 feet tall, 14 feet wide and 7.5 feet long.

The spacecraft will take a road trip to Buckley Air Force Base, where a U.S. Air Force C-17 cargo plane waits. Later this morning, technicians will offload the container with MAVEN and place it inside the C-17's cargo hold.

Guy Beutelschies, MAVEN's program manager at Lockheed Martin, says the company has shipped more than a half-dozen interplanetary spacecraft from Denver to Florida over the last 15 years. Much of the team has worked most or all of those operations, Beutelschies said.

The MAVEN transport team meets for a pre-mission briefing before departing Lockheed Martin's Denver facility. Photo credit: Stephen Clark/Spaceflight Now

A NASA spacecraft set to launch to Mars this fall will take a cross-country plane ride Friday in the belly of a U.S. Air Force cargo jet, and we've been invited along for the ride.

It's an all-day ordeal, starting early Friday at Lockheed Martin's satellite factory in suburban Denver and ending Friday night at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where the Mars orbiter will be placed inside a clean room for final launch preparations.

The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission, or MAVEN, is the first spacecraft to be dispatched to the red planet specifically to study the desert world's thin atmosphere.

"We've never sent a spacecraft to Mars just to explore its upper atmosphere," said Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN's chief scientist from the University of Colorado at Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. "If you imagine Mars as having had a thicker, warmer atmosphere early in its history, where did the atmosphere ago? Where did the water go?"

The job of the $453 million MAVEN mission is to find out, answering one of the most fundamental questions about the red planet: Why did the climate change on Mars?

Built by Lockheed Martin, MAVEN will launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Nov. 18 aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket. If all goes well, the craft will slide into orbit around Mars in September 2014.

But before it rockets away to Mars, some logistics are in order - like moving the delicate custom-built spacecraft from Colorado to Florida.

An Air Force C-17 cargo plane will do the job, jetting MAVEN from a military base outside Denver to the Shuttle Landing Facility runway at KSC.

All along the way, MAVEN will be hooked up to a purge system to keep the satellite and its three sensor packages pristine during the journey. And several dozen Lockheed Martin engineers and technicians will accompany MAVEN on the trip to help load and unload the craft from the C-17 and babysit the orbiter.

It takes meticulous planning to pull off such a move in a single day, with every move carefully choreographed well in advance. We'll be there to chronicle the job, offering a look into a rarely-seen part of all space missions.

We'll be posting updates here throughout the day Friday and Saturday, when workers will open the crate housing MAVEN inside the KSC clean room.

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