NASA Announces Construction of New Mars Rover for 2016 to Explore Red Planet

The Curiosity and Opportunity Mars Rovers will be joined by a third rover by 2016. NASA announced today that they received the green light to go ahead and begin construction on the newest Mars rover, set to launch in March of 2016.

The rover, InSight, will launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California following its completion. Other agencies worldwide are involved in the project, including the French Space Agency, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and the German Space Agency along with members from Austria, Belgium, Canada, Spain, and the UK.

The rover is designed to drill beneath the surface and investigate Mars' deep interior to better understand how it evolved as a rocky planet. NASA and others believe that by collecting more information about the inner structures of Mars' core, mantle, and crust, it will help them understand all there is to know before the 2030 missions to the red planet.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory made the announcement on Monday. The mission is referred to as NASA's Interior Exploration Using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport. The InSight rover will be equipped with a robotic arm that will deploy surface and burrowing instruments, as well as two new instruments: the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure and the Heat Flow and Physical Properties package. The former will be provided by Switzerland, Germany, and the UK, and the latter will be provided by the German national space agency.

"Our partners across the globe have made significant progress in getting to this point and are fully prepared to deliver their hardware to system integration starting this November, which is the next major milestone for the project," said Tom Hoffman, InSight project manager of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, in a news release. "We now move from doing the design and analysis to building and testing the hardware and software that will get us to Mars and collect the science that we need to achieve mission success."

The InSight rover will land near Mars' equator and will conduct a 720-day mission through providing information gathered by its new tools. Spain's Centro de Astrobiologia wind and temperature sensors will also help detect such atmospheric information as well as the planet's weather at the landing site.