Astronauts Harrison Schmitt (left) and Eugene Andrew Cernan practice taking geological samples at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, in preparation for NASA's scheduled Apollo 17 lunar landing mission, on August 28, 1972. Schmitt is the Lunar Module Pilot and Cernan is the mission's Commander. They are training for their period of EVA (extravehicular activity) on the Moon. (Photo by Space Frontiers/Getty Images)

U.S. Army soldiers with the 1st Battalion, 501st Infantry Regiment deployed to Combat Outpost Sabari, Afghanistan scan their area as they begin a multi-day air assault mission near the Pakistani border of eastern Afghanistan's Khost province May 2, 2012. (Photo by Staff Sgt. Joshua L. DeMotts/U.S. Air Force)

Britain's Red Arrows airplane display team perform during D-Day commemorations in Portsmouth in southern England on June 5, 2014. Several hundred surviving veterans of the 1944 D-Day landings are commemorating the 70th anniversary of the mission on both sides of the English channel. (Photo by Carl Court/AFP Photo)

A robot is seen on Mount Etna, Italy on July 4, 2017. Mount Etna, in Sicily, is a test bed for the approximately three-foot high, four-wheeled machine ahead of a future mission to the moon. It is being conducted by the German Aerospace Centre, the agency which runs Germany's space programme. (Photo by Antonio Parrinello/Reuters)

A helicopter of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) flies through millions of Locusts as spreads pesticide to fight against a swarm of locusts threatening to reach Amparihibe village on May 7, 2014 in Tsiroanomandidy, Madagascar. FAO mission is to fight the locust's swarm with an insecticide. (Photo by AFP Photo/RIJASOLO)

A Ugandan soldier, part of the 9,000-strong African Union Mission in Somalia, (AMISOM) walks through the Banadir soccer stadium on August 15, 2011 in Mogadishu, Somalia. The stadium, Somalia's largest soccer facility, had been under control by Islamic extremist Shabab militants for the past two years until they withdrew from the capital more than a week ago. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

A model of the New Horizons spacecraft is seen at a live television program on NASA television celebrating the spacecraft's closest proximity to Pluto, at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, site of the mission operations center, in Laurel, Maryland, USA, 14 July 2015. At approximately 7:49 am ET (11:49 am GMT), 14 July, New Horizons was scheduled to be as close to Pluto as the spacecraft will get; about 7,800 miles (12,500 kilometers) above the surface, following a journey of more than nine years and three billion miles. This is the first mission to the Pluto System and the Kuiper Belt. (Photo by Michael Reynolds/EPA)

This artist's scoreboard displays a fictional game between Mars and Earth, with Mars in the lead. It refers to the success rate of sending missions to Mars, both as orbiters and landers. Of the previous 39 missions targeted for Mars from around the world, 15 have been successes and 24 failures. For baseball fans, that's a batting average of .385. The United States has had 13 successes out of 18 attempts, or a “batting average” of .722. NASA's Curiosity rover, set to land on the Red Planet the evening of Aug. 5, 2012 PDT (morning of Aug. 6 EDT), will mark the United States' 19th attempt to tackle the challenge of Mars, and the world's 40th attempt. (Image by NASA/JPL-Caltech)