NASA’s Phoenix Mars lander began its long distance love affair with the red planet Monday - but by airlift.

A huge C-17 cargo plane departed Buckley Air Force Base in Colorado and has delivered the next Mars mission to Florida, a forward step toward its blastoff in August. Liftoff is a mere 86 days away atop a Delta 2 booster.

Phoenix is targeted for a legged landing at Mars’ arctic region in May 2008.

It was all tender-loving care as the spacecraft builders, technicians and other specialists at Lockheed Martin Space Systems crated up the Phoenix spacecraft near Denver, Colorado for its flight to Florida.

Numbers of “loadmasters” worked together to get the Mars probe and its related hardware onto the aircraft. Phoenix was contained within a nitrogen-purged box, loaded with sensors to gauge any bumps and thumps en route to the Kennedy Space Center. The large crate was chained down solid inside the plane.

The C-17 Globemaster III was commanded by Major J. Scot Heathman out of Charleston Air Force Base. After a 3.5 hour flight, Heathman and his flight crew brought the plane down to an incredibly smooth touch down at the Shuttle Landing Facility at the Kennedy Space Center.

Ground teams then extracted the boxed-up Phoenix and drove the probe to a nearby facility for further checkout and preparation for launch.

All went well in the flight and delivery of NASA’s Phoenix Mars lander - destined to open a new chapter in the exploration of the red planet and the quest to understand whether that world is now — or was ever — an extraterrestrial abode for life.

You can find out more about Phoenix by going to these earlier stories: