NASA has provided a long-awaited update on plans for the Artemis 2 launch, including a Jan. 17 rollout of the launch vehicle to the pad.

As part of the Artemis 2 mission, the US space agency is getting ready to roll out its giant Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and the Orion spacecraft to the launch pad over the next few days. If all goes to plan, Nasa will be starting the move on Saturday 17 January.

The space rock, known as “2026 AJ” and 40 feet in diameter, is hurtling towards our planet at around 20,500 miles per hour.

The European Space Agency (ESA) is still in the dark about NASA's participation in its Venus explorat Envision despite the project's tight deadline, ESA representatives said in a recent media briefing.

With launch potentially just three weeks away, the agency is working tirelessly to get the SLS rocket, Orion spacecraft, and the Artemis 2 crew ready for liftoff.

NASA makes unprecedented decision to bring International Space Station crew home early after medical emergency – first time in 25-year station history.

Among other things, the James Webb Space Telescope is designed to get us closer to finding habitable worlds around faraway stars. From its perch a million miles from Earth, Webb’s huge gold-coated mirror collects more light than any other telescope put into space.

Scientists are using the cutting-edge satellite technology from the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NASIR) to rethink how we understand earthquakes.

The Artemis II mission was originally slated for Nov. 2024, with astronaut Reid Wiseman appointed as commander of a 4-person crew aboard the agency's brand new space vehicle. The scheduled date was pushed back to April 2026, however, and now appears to be ramping up for an even earlier 2026 blast off.

"Awards like these are a critical component of our incubator program for future missions, which combines government leadership with commercial innovation to make what is impossible today rapidly implementable in the future," said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA's Astrophysics Division in the statement.