NASA will make a second attempt to launch its powerful new Moon rocket on Saturday, after scrubbing a test flight earlier in the week, an official said Tuesday.

The highly anticipated uncrewed mission—dubbed Artemis 1—will bring the United States a step closer to returning astronauts to the Moon five decades after humans last walked on the lunar surface.

Mission manager Mike Sarafin, said the NASA team "agreed to move our launch date to Saturday, September the third."

Blastoff had been planned for Monday morning but was canceled because a test to get one of the rocket's four RS-25 engines to the proper temperature range for launch was not successful.

On its mission to the Moon, NASA's Orion spacecraft is designed to use NASA's Near Space Network and Deep Space Network to navigate. But if the craft loses communication with the ground or the Networks, crews can use a backup autonomous navigation system known as Optical Navigation (OpNav). This system analyzes images of the Moon or Earth taken from the spacecraft to determine its position relative to either of those two bodies.

An investigation currently underway aboard the International Space Station is helping developers of OpNav fine-tune the system to ensure that crews return home safely. The Moon Imagery investigation uses photographs of the Moon taken from the space station to calibrate the system software.

"The space station gives us a platform to collect images of the Moon without interference from Earth's atmosphere," says principal investigator Steve Lockhart at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Was there ever life on the moon? What about on other planets?

With the U.S. slated to blast off soon to orbit the moon—its first trip there in 50 years—the University of Virginia and NASA's Artemis space missions seek to answer big questions like these, while pushing the scope of what can be analyzed on alien soils.

The new collaborative research will take the form of a roving, ground-level probe. It won't be done in time for this first unmanned launch, of course.

Instead, the technology could be part of a future mission to the moon—and perhaps beyond. The space program is also contemplating putting humans on Mars.

"The basic idea of this NASA-funded project is to obtain biological and elemental signatures, as well to detect surface morphology, to determine whether there was any life," said engineering professor and principal investigator Mool Gupta, in whose laser lab a key portion of the technology will be created.