JPL Hosts Media Teleconference About Supernovas

NASA will host a news teleconference at 10 a.m. PST (1 p.m. EST) Wednesday, Feb. 19, to announce new observations from its high-energy X-ray mission, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR).

The findings reveal new information about supernovas, the tremendous explosions that mark the ends of massive stars’ lives.

The briefing participants are:

— Paul Hertz, director of NASA’s Astrophysics Division in Washington
— Fiona Harrison, NuSTAR principal investigator, California Institute of Technology,
— Brian Grefenstette, astronomer, Caltech
— Robert Kirshner, astronomer, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass.

Audio and visuals will be streamed live online at: http://www.ustream.tv/nasajpl2. Audio of the teleconference will be streamed live on NASA’s website at: http://www.nasa.gov/newsaudio.

A link to the graphics will be posted at the start of the teleconference on NASA’s NuSTAR site: http://www.nasa.gov/NuSTAR.

NuSTAR is a Small Explorer mission led by Caltech in Pasadena and managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory also in Pasadena, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The spacecraft was built by Orbital Sciences Corporation, Dulles, Va. Its instrument was built by a consortium including Caltech; JPL; the University of California, Berkeley; Columbia University, New York; NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.; the Danish Technical University in Denmark; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, Calif.; ATK Aerospace Systems, Goleta, Calif., and with support from the Italian Space Agency (ASI) Science Data Center.

NuSTAR’s mission operations center is at UC Berkeley, with the ASI providing its equatorial ground station located at Malindi, Kenya. The mission’s outreach program is based at Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, Calif. NASA’s Explorer Program is managed by Goddard. JPL is managed by Caltech for NASA.