As NASA prepares for its next mission to the moon, one Atlanta university is drawing attention for its growing role in space exploration.

Four astronauts — three Americans and one Canadian — are scheduled to launch at 6:24 p.m. Eastern on the first crewed journey to the moon since 1972. But they will not land there on this mission.

A Virtual Telescope Project livestream aims to track NASA's Artemis 2 Orion spacecraft after launch — here's how to watch it as it travels through space.

The Artemis II crew will be the first humans in decades to fly beyond low-Earth orbit, meaning that they won’t be protected by our magnetic field. As such, the space cadets will be exposed to deep-space radiation, which can raise the astronauts’ risk of cancer, with extreme doses causing acute symptoms, according to New Scientist.

Helping the astronauts of Artemis II speak to the folks on Earth is the Deep Space Network, operated out of Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida — The US military has always been part of NASA’s human spaceflight program. The first astronauts were nearly all military pilots, and two of the four crew members set to fly around the Moon on NASA’s Artemis II mission were Navy test pilots before joining the astronaut corps.

December 11, 1998—launch day for the Mars Climate Orbiter (MCO) and the accompanying Polar Lander, both of which were part of a larger NASA initiative known as Mars Surveyor ’98. NASA had commissioned Lockheed Martin to design and build the MCO, which was was destined to gather data on Martian weather while communicating with the Polar Lander.