NASA Hosts Media Briefing on Kepler Planetary Discovery

NASA will host a news briefing at 11 a.m. PDT (2 p.m. EDT), Thursday, April 18, to announce new discoveries from the agency’s Kepler mission.

The briefing will be held at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and will 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 a moderated Web chat featuring Kepler Deputy Project Scientist Nick Gautier of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory 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 Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
— William Borucki, Kepler science principal investigator, Ames Research Center
— 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 and the public may submit questions for the news conference participants via Twitter to #AskNASA.

For NASA TV streaming video, scheduling and downlink information, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/ntv .

For more information about the Kepler mission and to view the digital press kit, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/kepler .