[meteorite-list] NASA and French Space Agency Sign Agreement for Mars Mission (InSight)

[Ron Baalke]

February 10, 2014

Dwayne Brown
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1726
dwayne.c.brown at nasa.gov 

Michael Braukus
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1979
michael.j.braukus at nasa.gov 
     
RELEASE 14-046

NASA and French Space Agency Sign Agreement for Mars Mission

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and Jean-Yves Le Gall, president of the  
National Center of Space Studies of France (CNES), signed an implementing  
agreement Monday 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," 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 InSight mission currently is planned for launch in March 2016 and is  
scheduled to land on Mars six months later. Designed to study the planet's  
deep interior, the lander seeks to understand the evolutionary formation of  
rocky planets, including Earth, by investigating Mars' deep interior. InSight  
also will investigate the dynamics of Martian tectonic activity and meteorite  
impacts using CNES's Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure instrument  
(SEIS).

SEIS will measure seismic waves travelling through the interior of Mars to  
determine its interior structure and composition, which will provide clues  
about the processes that shaped the planet during its earliest stages of  
formation.

Other partners working with CNES on the SEIS instrument include: the German  
Aerospace Center, United Kingdom Space Agency, Swiss Space Office (through  
the European Space Agency) and NASA.

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.

For more information about SEIS, visit:

http://smsc.cnes.fr/INSIGHT/ 

For more about InSight, visit:

http://insight.jpl.nasa.gov 

For more information about NASA and planetary exploration, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov

-end-