It turns out that there's going to be some international cooperation when it comes to a mission to Mars. The U.S. and France unveiled plans to collaborate on a new Mars mission, according to News24. The announcement comes just two years after NASA withdrew from a European partnership to send a probe and lander to the Red Planet.
On Monday, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and President of the National Center of Space Studies of France Jean-Yves Le Gall signed an implementing agreement for cooperation on a future NASA Mars lander, according to ScienceBlog. Known as the Interior Exploration Using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) mission, the project will send an unmanned lander to study the deep interior of Mars.
"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 in an interview with ScienceBlog. "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."
Currently, the InSight mission is scheduled for launch in March 2016 and will land on the Red Planet six months later. It should hopefully give scientists a better look at the evolutionary formation of rocky planets, including Earth. It will measure seismic waves traveling through the interior of Mars in order to determine its internal structure by using CNES's Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure instrument (SEIS). This will give researchers a good picture of the Red Planet, which could aid in future missions and exploration efforts.
Want more information about the new mission? You can find out about it here.
