NASA Hosts Media Briefing to Discuss Kepler Planetary Discovery
NASA will host a news briefing at 2 p.m. EDT, Thursday, April 18, to announce new discoveries from the agency’s Kepler mission. The briefing will be held in the Syvertson Auditorium, Building N-201, at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and be broadcast live on NASA Television and on the agency’s website.
The briefing will also be streamed live at http://www.ustream.tv/NASAJPL2, with moderated Web chat featuring Kepler deputy project scientist Nick Gautier of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. The briefing will also be broadcast live at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nasa-arc
Kepler is the first NASA mission capable of finding Earth-size planets in or near the habitable zone, which is the range of distance from a star where the surface temperature of an orbiting planet might be suitable for liquid water. Launched in 2009, the Kepler space telescope is detecting planets and planet candidates with a wide range of sizes and orbital distances to help us better understand our place in the galaxy.
The briefing participants are:
— Paul Hertz, astrophysics director, NASA Headquarters, Washington
— Roger Hunter, Kepler project manager, Ames
— William Borucki, Kepler science principal investigator, Ames
— Thomas Barclay, Kepler scientist, Bay Area Environmental Research Institute, Sonoma, Calif.
— Lisa Kaltenegger, research group leader, Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg, Germany, and research associate, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass.
News media representatives may attend in-person or by teleconference. To register or obtain dial-in information, contact Michele Johnson at 650-604-4789 or [email protected] by noon EDT Thursday, April 18.
To reach Ames, take U.S. Highway 101 to the Moffett Field-NASA Parkway exit and drive east toward the main gate. Media representatives must obtain a badge at the Visitor Badge Office, located at the main gate.
News media representatives and the public may submit questions via Twitter to #AskNASA.
For NASA TV streaming video, scheduling and downlink information, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/ntv
The event also will be streamed live on Ustream at: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nasa-arc
For more information about the Kepler mission and to view the digital press kit, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/kepler
Editor’s note: Not that this has any indiciation of what will be announced but Lisa Kaltenegger’s Kepler-related publications all focus on small, habitable extrasolar planets and moons. (search). Thomas Barclay’s papers also focus on Kepler and extrasolar planets. (search). These papers (by other authors) “The detectability of habitable exomoons with Kepler“ and “Where to Find Habitable “Earths” in Circumbinary Systems“ were submitted to astro-ph last week.
