After successfully completing a critical design review of its new Mars lander, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration can start the process of digging into Mars' past, literally.

NASA and its international partners -- Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Poland, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom -- have gotten the go-ahead to begin construction on the Interior Exploration Using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) mission, designed to bore deep into the Red Planet's surface to study its interior.

"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," Tom Hoffman, InSight Project Manager of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said 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 lander is scheduled to launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base, on the central California coast, in March 2016, the very first interplanetary mission to launch from the Golden State.

According to a NASA news release, aside from providing valuable data for the space agency's extended effort to send humans to Mars by the 2030s, the InSight mission will investigate how Earth-like planets formed and developed their layered inner structure of core, mantle and crust.

The mission will collect information about the planet's interior zones with instruments never used on Mars before, such as: a robotic arm that will incorporate surface and burrowing instruments contributed by France and Germany; the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure, developed from a partnership between Switzerland and the United Kingdom; and the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package, from Germany's space program, that will measure heat coming toward the surface from the planet's interior.

"Mars actually offers an advantage over Earth itself for understanding how habitable planetary surfaces can form," said Bruce Banerdt, InSight principal investigator from JPL. "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."

The three-legged lander will settle into a site near the Martian equator and provide observational data and analysis for a planned 720 days, or about two Earth years.