U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Administrator Charles Bolden and Jean-Yves Le Gall, president of the National Center of Space Studies of France (CNES), signed an agreement Tuesday for cooperation on a future NASA Mars lander called the Interior Exploration Using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) mission. "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," Bolden said. The InSight mission is planned for launch in March 2016. It is designed to study the planet's deep interior and understand the evolutionary formation of rocky planets, including Earth. InSight will also investigate the dynamics of Martian tectonic activity and meteorite impacts using CNES' Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) instrument. Partners working with CNES on the SEIS instrument include the German Aerospace Center, the U.K. Space Agency, and the Swiss Space Office. InSight's international science team is made up of researchers from Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
