After a Mission Critical Design Review on May 16, NASA and its partners have received final approval for the Interior Exploration Using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) mission.

Unlike the Mars rovers, InSight will be a stationary lander designed to explore the interior of the planet. Using technical contributions and instruments from France, Germany, Switzerland and the UK the mission will seek to further our understanding of how Earth-like planets form and how their core, mantle and crust are formed.

Among other things the InSight lander will measure the waves created by “marsquakes” and meteor impacts. It will also attempt to measure the heat flowing from the planet’s core to its surface.

“Mars actually offers an advantage over Earth itself for understanding how habitable planetary surfaces can form. Both planets underwent the same early processes. But Mars, being smaller, cooled faster and became less active while Earth kept churning. So Mars better preserves the evidence about the early stages of rocky planets’ development,” said Bruce Banerdt, InSight Principal Investigator from JPL in a statement.

If everything goes as planned, Insight will launch in March 2016 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. It will land on a spot near the Martian equator and transmit information for almost two years.

“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. 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,” said Tom Hoffman, InSight Project Manager of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, California.

According to NASA, InSight is the next step toward manned missions to mars in the 2030s.