NASA and France sign deal on future Mars lander mission

U.S. President Barack Obama and French President Francois Hollande dined together Tuesday night at a state dinner filled with stars like director J.J. Abrams and comedian Stephen Colbert — one day after the two countries signed a celestial deal for cooperation on a future Mars lander mission to determine the interior structure of the planet. The pact follows the successful landing and research carried out by NASA’s Curiosity rover. 

The mission, dubbed the Interior Exploration Using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy, and Heat Transport (InSight), follows more than 20 years of cooperation between NASA and the National Center of Space Studies of France (CNES), NASA administrator Charles Bolden said in a press release.

“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,” Bolden said.

The exploration of Mars is a top priority for NASA, which plans a future human mission there.

InSight will launch in March 2016 and is scheduled to land on Mars six months later. The mission hopes to learn more about the evolutionary formation of rocky planets — including Earth.

NASA and CNES will place instruments on the Martian surface to determine whether the core of the red planet is solid or liquid, like Earth’s. It will investigate why Mars’ crust is not divided into tectonic plates that drift like Earth’s.

It also seeks to understand Martian tectonic activity and meteorite impacts. By measuring seismic waves traveling through the the planet's interior, InSight hopes to discover clues about the earliest stages of the Mar’s formation.

Curiosity, which has traveled three miles over the Martian surface since its August 2012 landing, successfully traversed a sand dune, NASA said Tuesday. An animated sequence of images from the rover’s camera documented the crossing.

NASA is using Curiosity to investigate ancient habitable environments and major environmental changes on the planet. The rover recently uncovered signs of an ancient freshwater lake on Mars that may have teemed with tiny organisms for tens of millions of years.

NASA's newest robotic explorer, Maven, was launched to Mars from Cape Canaveral in November 2013 to investigate how the planet went from a warm, wet world in its first billion years to the cold, dry desert it is today.

NASA’s 2007 Phoenix lander mission was the first to determine that water existed near the surface in Mars’ polar regions, a major indication that life may have existed on the planet.

NASA’s Mariner completed the first flyby of Mars in 1964, when it took the first photos of the Martian surface. But the first successful landing, with signals being sent back to Earth, wasn’t until January 2004, when NASA’s Spirit rover drove onto the surface of the red planet.

Previous missions to Mars have investigated its surface — studying canyons, volcanoes, rocks, and soil. But no mission has attempted to discover clues about the planet's earliest evolution, which can only be found under the surface.