A C-17 from Charleston AFB, S.C., airlifted NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander spacecraft from Colorado to Florida. A NASA release says that Lockheed Martin workers in Denver had been assembling and testing the spacecraft for more than a year. NASA plans to launch Phoenix, which is designed to test a Martian Arctic plain to see whether it could have sustained microbacterial life, aboard a Delta II from Cape Canaveral AFS, Fla., in August.
All 12 American bombers deployed in Britain rapidly returned to the U.S. on Oct. 4 following security concerns about a potential Iranian threat to their base in the U.K.