The U.S. and France are joining forces for a new mission to the red planet - Mars - in 2016.
On Monday, February 10, the agreement was signed by Charles Bolden, administrator of National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Jean-Yves Le Gall, president of the National Center of Space Studies of France (CNES) in Washington.
"This new agreement strengthens the partnership between NASA and CNES in planetary science research, and builds on more than 20 years of cooperation with CNES on Mars exploration," said Bolden. "The research generated by this collaborative mission will give our agencies more information about the early formation of Mars, which will help us understand more about how Earth evolved."
The project will see cooperation between the two countries to send a NASA Mars lander, dubbed the Interior Exploration Using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy, and Heat Transport (InSight) mission to the red planet. The unmanned lander will study the interiors of Mars.
Apart from researchers from the U.S. and the UK, InSight's international science team is composed of researchers from all over the world namely - Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Poland, Spain, and Switzerland.
The mission is slated to launch another two years from now in March 2016 and will arrive on Mars six months later in September. The mission will also look to get a deeper understanding of the evolutionary formation of rocky plants, which include Earth. Moreover, InSight will also persevere to examine the subtleties of Martian tectonic activity, as well as meteorite impacts. For this, InSight will deploy CNES' Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure instrument (SEIS).
SEIS will help measure the seismic waves that travel through Mars' core and in turn determine the planet's structure and composition. This information will give researchers valuable inputs and clues about the processes that went into shaping Mars at its nascent stages.
InSight will not only gather valuable data on the initial formation of Mars, it would also delve into the impact of tectonic and meteorite activities and how they played a pivotal role in the formation of the rocky planet as we know it today.
Currently, NASA has two rovers that are exploring Mars - the Curiosity rover (launched in 2012) and the Opportunity rover (launched in 2003).
