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By NASA
NASA’s Artemis II SLS (Space Launch System) rocket poised to send four astronauts from Earth on a journey around the Moon next year may appear identical to the Artemis I SLS rocket. On closer inspection, though, engineers have upgraded the agency’s Moon rocket inside and out to improve performance, reliability, and safety.
SLS flew a picture perfect first mission on the Artemis I test flight, meeting or exceeding parameters for performance, attitude control, and structural stability to an accuracy of tenths or hundredths of a percent as it sent an uncrewed Orion thousands of miles beyond the Moon. It also returned volumes of invaluable flight data for SLS engineers to analyze to drive improvements.
Teams with NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems integrate the SLS (Space Launch System) Moon rocket with the solid rocket boosters onto mobile launcher 1 inside High Bay 3 of the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in March 2025. Artemis II is the first crewed test flight under NASA’s Artemis campaign and is another step toward missions on the lunar surface and helping the agency prepare for future human missions to Mars.NASA/Frank Michaux For Artemis II, the major sections of SLS remain unchanged – a central core stage, four RS-25 main engines, two five-segment solid rocket boosters, the ICPS (interim cryogenic propulsion stage), a launch vehicle stage adapter to hold the ICPS, and an Orion stage adapter connecting SLS to the Orion spacecraft. The difference is in the details.
“While we’re proud of our Artemis I performance, which validated our overall design, we’ve looked at how SLS can give our crews a better ride,” said John Honeycutt, NASA’s SLS Program manager. “Some of our changes respond to specific Artemis II mission requirements while others reflect ongoing analysis and testing, as well as lessons learned from Artemis I.”
Engineers have outfitted the ICPS with optical targets that will serve as visual cues to the astronauts aboard Orion as they manually pilot Orion around the upper stage and practice maneuvers to inform docking operations for Artemis III.
The Artemis II rocket includes an improved navigation system compared to Artemis I. Its communications capability also has been improved by repositioning antennas on the rocket to ensure continuous communications with NASA ground stations and the U.S. Space Force’s Space Launch Delta 45 which controls launches along the Eastern Range.
An emergency detection system on the ICPS allows the rocket to sense and respond to problems and notify the crew. The flight safety system adds a time delay to the self-destruct system to allow time for Orion’s escape system to pull the capsule to safety in event of an abort.
The separation motors that push the solid rocket booster away after the elements are no longer needed were angled an additional 15 degrees to increase separation clearance as the rest of the rocket speeds by.
Additionally, SLS will jettison the spent boosters four seconds earlier during Artemis II ascent than occurred during Artemis I. Dropping the boosters several seconds closer to the end of their burn will give engineers flight data to correlate with projections that shedding the boosters several seconds sooner will yield approximately 1,600 pounds of payload to Earth orbit for future SLS flights.
Engineers have incorporated additional improvements based on lessons learned from Artemis I. During the Artemis I test flight the SLS rocket experienced higher-than-expected vibrations near the solid rocket booster attachment points that was caused by unsteady airflow.
To steady the airflow, a pair of six-foot-long strakes flanking each booster’s forward connection points on the SLS intertank will smooth vibrations induced by airflow during ascent, and the rocket’s electronics system was requalified to endure higher levels of vibrations.
Engineers updated the core stage power distribution control unit, mounted in the intertank, which controls power to the rocket’s other electronics and protects against electrical hazards.
These improvements have led to an enhanced rocket to support crew as part of NASA’s Golden Age of innovation and exploration.
The approximately 10-day Artemis II test flight is the first crewed flight under NASA’s Artemis campaign. It is another step toward new U.S.-crewed missions on the Moon’s surface that will help the agency prepare to send the first astronauts – Americans – to Mars.
https://www.nasa.gov/artemis
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Jonathan Deal
Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala.
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Last Updated Sep 17, 2025 EditorLee MohonContactJonathan DealLocationMarshall Space Flight Center Related Terms
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Curiosity Navigation Curiosity Home Mission Overview Where is Curiosity? Mission Updates Science Overview Instruments Highlights Exploration Goals News and Features Multimedia Curiosity Raw Images Images Videos Audio Mosaics More Resources Mars Missions Mars Sample Return Mars Perseverance Rover Mars Curiosity Rover MAVEN Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Mars Odyssey More Mars Missions Mars Home 3 min read
Curiosity Blog, Sols 4655-4660: Boxworks With a View
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image, showing the boxwork terrain in the foreground and the bright wind-sculpted material in the distance, on Sept. 12, 2025. Curiosity used its Right Navigation Camera on Sol 4657, or Martian day 4,657 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission, at 00:50:58 UTC. NASA/JPL-Caltech Written by Sharon Wilson Purdy, Planetary Geologist at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum
Earth planning date: Friday Sept. 12, 2025
Curiosity continues to image, analyze, and traverse through a landscape characterized by higher standing ridges separating low-lying depressions (hollows) — a surface known as the boxwork terrain on Mount Sharp. The science team is actively characterizing the texture, chemistry, and mineralogy of the ridges and hollows to understand how this surface formed and changed over time. I served as the Geology theme group “Keeper of the Plan” for Sols 4656-4657 where I compiled the details for each scientific activity that will be carried out by the rover. I selected the particular Navcam image accompanying this blog post because it not only shows the intriguing boxwork terrain beneath our wheels but also highlights the striking wind-sculpted yardangs on our exciting route ahead.
Our successful drive over the weekend set us up nicely to investigate the bedrock ridge in the workspace directly in front of the rover on Sol 4655. The target “Chango” was selected for closer inspection with the dust removal tool (DRT) and APXS and MAHLI instruments. ChemCam used its LIBS instrument to analyze the chemistry of a bedrock ridge at the “Quechua” target, and Mastcam and ChemCam included several mosaics to document walls of nearby hollow interiors, fractures, and the hollow-to-ridge transitions.
The plan for Sols 4656-4657 focused on a variety of remote sensing activities including a 360-degree mosaic by Mastcam — one of the most spectacular data products! ChemCam investigated the local bedrock and a raised resistant bedrock feature at “Chita” and “Chaco,” respectively, and then turned its sights to the distant floor of Gale crater to image features that may have formed when water eroded material from the interior walls of the crater rim.
Planning on Friday for Sols 4658-4660 included three targeted science blocks to dig deeper into the boxwork unit. ChemCam LIBS will analyze the bedrock at targets “Tarata” and “El Sombrio” and a rock that does not look like typical bedrock at “Cobres.” The Mastcam team assembled multiple images and mosaics that will help decipher the distribution of veins, fractures, and nodules (somewhat rounded features) in the bedrock, as well as small sand dunes in and around the workspace. The environmental theme group worked throughout the week to monitor clouds and dust-devil activity, and planned Mastcam tau observations to assess the optical depth of the atmosphere and constrain aerosol scattering properties.
Want to read more posts from the Curiosity team?
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Last Updated Sep 15, 2025 Related Terms
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Curiosity Blog, Sols 4649-4654: Ridges, Hollows and Nodules, Oh My
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image using its Left Navigation Camera, showing the transition from smoother ridge bedrock (right) to more nodular bedrock (bottom left to top middle) on the edge of a shallow hollow (top left). Curiosity, whose masthead shadow is also visible, captured this image on Sept. 5, 2025 — Sol 4650, or Martian day 4,650 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission — at 00:22:34 UTC. NASA/JPL-Caltech Written by Lucy Thompson, Planetary Scientist and APXS Team Member, University of New Brunswick, Canada
Earth planning date: Friday, Sept. 5, 2025
Curiosity is in the midst of the boxwork campaign, trying to decipher why we see such pronounced ridges and hollows in this area of Mount Sharp. When this terrain was first identified from orbit it was hypothesized that the ridges may be the result of cementation by circulating fluids, followed by differential erosion of the less resistant bedrock in between (the hollows that we now observe).
We have been exploring the boxwork terrain documenting textures, structures and composition to investigate potential differences between ridges and hollows. One of the textural features we have observed are nodules in varying abundance. The focus of our activities this week was to document the transition from smoother bedrock atop a boxwork ridge to more nodular bedrock associated with the edge of a shallow hollow.
In Tuesday’s three-sol plan we analyzed the smoother bedrock within the ridge, documenting textures with MAHLI, Mastcam, and ChemCam RMI, and chemistry with ChemCam LIBS and APXS. Curiosity then successfully bumped towards the edge of the ridge/hollow to place the more nodular bedrock in our workspace. Friday’s three-sol plan was basically a repeat of the previous observations, but this time focused on the more nodular bedrock. The planned drive should take us to another boxwork ridge, and closer to the area where we plan to drill into one of the ridges.
As the APXS strategic planner this week, I helped to select the rock targets for analysis by our instrument, ensuring they were safe to touch and that they met the science intent of the boxwork campaign. I also communicated to the rest of the team the most recent results from our APXS compositional analyses and how they fit into our investigation of the boxwork terrain. This will help to inform our fast-approaching decision about where to drill.
Both plans included Mastcam and ChemCam long-distance RMI imaging of more distant features, including other boxwork ridges and hollows, buttes, the yardang unit, and Gale crater rim. Planned environmental activities continue to monitor dust in the atmosphere, dust-devil activity, and clouds. Standard REMS, RAD, and DAN activities round out the week’s activities.
Want to read more posts from the Curiosity team?
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4 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
What Would It Take to Say We Found Life?
We call this the podium test. What would it take for you personally to confidently stand up in front of an international audience and make that claim? When you put it in that way, I think for a lot of scientists, the bar is really high.
So of course, there would be obvious things, you know, a very clear signature of technology or a skeleton or something like that. But we think that a lot of the evidence that we might encounter first will be much more subtle. For example, chemical signs of life that have to be detected above a background of abiotic chemistry. And really, what we see might depend a lot on where we look.
On Mars, for example, the long history of exploration there gives us a lot of context for what we might find. But we’re potentially talking about samples that are billions of years old in those cases, and on Earth, those kinds of samples, the evidence of life is often degraded and difficult to detect.
On the ocean worlds of our outer solar system, so places like Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus, there’s the tantalizing possibility of extant life, meaning life that’s still alive. But potentially we’re talking about exceedingly small amounts of samples that would have to be analyzed with a relatively limited amount of instrumentation that can be carried from Earth billions of miles away.
And then for exoplanets, these are planets beyond our own solar system. Really, what we’re looking for there are very large magnitude signs of life that can be detectable through a telescope from many light-years away. So changes like the oxygenation of Earth’s atmosphere or changes in surface color.
So any one of those things, if they rose to the suspicion of being evidence of life, would be really heavily scrutinized in a very sort of specific and custom way to that particular observation. But I think there are also some general principles that we can follow. And the first is just: Are we sure we’re seeing what we think we’re seeing? Many of these environments are not very well known to us, and so we need to convince ourselves that we’re actually seeing a clear signal that represents what we think it represents.
Carl Sagan once said, “Life is the hypothesis of last resort,” meaning that we ought to work hard for such a claim to rule out alternative possibilities. So what are those possibilities? One is contamination. The spacecraft and the instruments that we use to look for evidence of life are built in an environment, Earth, that is full of life. And so we need to convince ourselves that what we’re seeing is not evidence of our own life, but evidence of indigenous life.
If that’s the case, we should ask, should life of the type we’re seeing live there? And finally, we need to ask, is there any other way than life to make that thing, any of the possible abiotic processes that we know and even the ones that we don’t know? And as you can imagine, that will be quite a challenge.
Once we have a piece of evidence in hand that we really do think represents evidence of life, now we can begin to develop hypotheses. For example, do we have separate independent lines of evidence that corroborate what we’ve seen and increase our confidence of life?
Ultimately, all of this has to be looked at hard by the entire scientific community, and in that sense, I think the really operative word in our question is we. What does it take to say we found evidence of life? Because really, the answer, I think, depends on the full scientific community scrutinizing and skepticizing this observation to finally say that we scientists, we as a community and we as humanity found life.
[END VIDEO TRANSCRIPT]
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Curiosity Navigation Curiosity Home Mission Overview Where is Curiosity? Mission Updates Science Overview Instruments Highlights Exploration Goals News and Features Multimedia Curiosity Raw Images Images Videos Audio Mosaics More Resources Mars Missions Mars Sample Return Mars Perseverance Rover Mars Curiosity Rover MAVEN Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Mars Odyssey More Mars Missions Mars Home 4 min read
Curiosity Blog, Sols 4641-4648: Thinking Outside and Inside the ‘Boxwork’
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image using its Left Navigation Camera on Aug. 28, 2025 — Sol 4643, or Martian day 4,643 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission — at 20:45:52 UTC. NASA/JPL-Caltech Written by Ashley Stroupe, Mission Operations Engineer and Rover Planner at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Earth planning week: Aug. 25, 2025.
This week Curiosity has been exploring the boxwork unit, investigating both the ridges and the hollows to better characterize them and understand how they may have formed. We’ve been doing lots of remote science, contact science, and driving in each plan. In addition, we have our standard daily environmental observations to look at dust in the atmosphere. We can still see distant targets like the crater rim, but temperatures will soon begin to warm up as we start moving into a dustier part of the year. And after each drive, we also use AEGIS to do some autonomous target selection for ChemCam observations. I was the arm rover planner for the 4645-4648 plan on Friday.
For Monday’s plan (sols 4641-4642), after a successful weekend drive Curiosity began on the edge of a boxwork ridge. We did a lot of imaging, including Mastcam mosaics of “El Alto,” an upturned rock near a wheel, the ridge forming the south side of the Mojo hollow, “Sauces,” our contact science target, and “Navidad,” an extension of our current workspace. We also took ChemCam LIBS of Sauces and an RMI mosaic. The rover planners did not find any bedrock large enough to brush, but did MAHLI and APXS on Sauces. Ready to drive, Curiosity drove about 15 meters (about 49 feet) around the ridge to the south and into the next hollow, named “Mojo.”
In Wednesday’s plan (sols 4643-4644), Curiosity was successfully parked in the Mojo hollow. We started with a lot of imaging, including Mastcam mosaics of the ridges around the Mojo hollow, a nearby trough and the hollow floor to look for regolith movement. We also imaged a fractured float rock named “La Laguna Verde.” ChemCam planned a LIBS target on “Corani,” a thin resistant clast sticking out of the regolith, a RMI mosaic of a target on the north ridge named “Cocotoni,” and a long-distance RMI mosaic of “Babati Mons,” a mound about 100 kilometers (about 62 miles) away that we can see peeking over the rim of Gale crater! With no bedrock in the workspace, the rover planners did MAHLI and APXS observations on a regolith target named “Tarapacá.” The 12-meter drive in this plan (about 39 feet) was challenging; driving out of the hollow and up onto the ridge required the rover to overcome tilts above 20 degrees, where the rover can experience a lot of slip. Also, with the drive late in the day, it was challenging to determine where Curiosity should be looking to track her slip using Visual Odometry without getting blinded by the sun or losing features in shadows. Making sure VO works well is particularly important on drives like this when we expect a lot of slip.
Friday’s plan, like most weekend plans, was more complex — particularly because this four-sol plan also covers the Labor Day holiday on Monday. Fortunately, the Wednesday drive was successful, and we reached the desired parking location on the ridge south of Mojo for imaging and contact science. The included image looks back over the rover’s shoulder, where we can see the ridge and hollow. We took a lot of imaging looking at hollows and the associated ridges. We are taking a Mastcam mosaic of “Jorginho Cove,” a target covering the ridge we are parked on and the next hollow to the south, “Pica,” a float rock that is grayish in color, and a ridge/hollow pair named “Laguna Colorada.” We also take ChemCam LIBS observations of Pica and two light-toned pieces of bedrock named “Tin Tin” and ”Olca.” ChemCam takes RMI observations of “Briones,” which is a channel on the crater rim, “La Serena,” some linear features in the crater wall, and a channel that feeds into the Peace Vallis fan.
After a week of fairly simple arm targets, the rover planners had a real challenge with this workspace. The rocks were mostly too small and too rough to brush, but we did find one spot after a lot of looking. We did DRT, APXS, and MAHLI on this spot, named “San Jose,” and also did MAHLI and APXS on another rock named “Malla Qullu.” This last drive of the week is about 15 meters (about 49 feet) following along a ridge and then driving onto a nearby one.
Want to read more posts from the Curiosity team?
Visit Mission Updates
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