Artemis II, the next mission in NASA’s Artemis program to explore the Moon, is scheduled to launch from Florida within the coming weeks. The mission will be the first crewed mission to the vicinity of the Moon since 1972, with the four-person crew expected to travel farther than any other human mission in spaceflight history.

NASA's Artemis 2 rocket will roll out Saturday (Jan. 17) ahead of a possible Feb. 6 launch. Here's how to watch. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. NASA's first mission to take humans to ...

NASA Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, Dr. Nicola Fox explains an intriguing rock that the Perseverance rover inspected named "Cheyava Falls." Credit: NASA

"The images MAVEN captured truly are incredible," Shannon Curry, MAVEN's principal investigator and research scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado Boulder, said as quoted by NASA.

NASA reports that its moon mission is accelerating, with plans to return astronauts to the lunar surface by 2028.