Approximately a month before it begins its research flight in the stratosphere, the balloon-borne solar observatory Sunrise III has looked at the Sun for the first time from its launch site at the Arctic Circle. In June, Sunrise III will take off from Esrange Space Center, the Swedish Space Agency's (SSC) balloon and rocket base in Kiruna (Sweden), and will climb to an altitude of about 35 kilometers. During its flight of several days, it will then take unique measurements of the Sun. In this way, processes in the chromosphere, the highly dynamic layer between the visible surface and the outer atmosphere of the Sun, will become visible more precisely than ever before. In the remaining weeks until launch, the technical and scientific teams from Germany, Spain, Japan, and the U.S. will prepare all systems and the scientific instruments for their mission and rehearse flight procedures and operations.

NASA officials gave an update Thursday on the status of the Artemis I moon rocket launch saying it likely is targeting early- to mid-June before it rolls back out to the launch pad for a wet dress rehearsal at Kennedy Space Center.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson suggested last week that August would be the earliest for a launch attempt, and NASA's Jim Free, the associate administrator for the Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, confirmed that.

"As we've been saying, we'll set that official launch date after we get through wet dress," Free said. "But you know based on some of historical challenges from similar programs over the years and the schedule performance we've seen thus far, we are looking at a couple of launch periods through the August time frame."

One of the previously announced launch windows runs from July 26 to Aug. 9.

NASA rolled the Space Launch System rocket topped with the Orion spacecraft to KSC's Launch Pad 39-B back in mid-March and attempted to run through a simulated countdown along with the filling and draining the core and upper stages with 730,000 gallons of super-cooled liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.