NASA Hosts Media Teleconference to Announce Latest Kepler Discoveries

NASA will host a news teleconference at 10 a.m. PST (1 p.m. EST), Wednesday, Feb. 26, to announce new discoveries made by its planet-hunting mission, the Kepler Space Telescope.

The briefing participants are:

— Douglas Hudgins, exoplanet exploration program scientist, NASA’s Astrophysics Division in Washington
— Jack Lissauer, planetary scientist, NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
— Jason Rowe, research scientist, SETI Institute, Mountain View, Calif.
— Sara Seager, professor of planetary science and physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass.

Launched in March 2009, Kepler was the first NASA mission to find Earth-size planets in or near the habitable zone — the range of distance from a star in which the surface temperature of an orbiting planet might sustain liquid water. The telescope has since detected planets and planet candidates spanning a wide range of sizes and orbital distances. These findings have led to a better understanding of our place in the galaxy.

The public is invited to listen to the teleconference live via UStream at:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nasa-arc and http://www.ustream.tv/nasajpl2

Questions can be submitted on Twitter using the hashtag #AskNASA.
Audio of the teleconference also will be streamed live at: http://www.nasa.gov/newsaudio

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

Ames is responsible for Kepler’s ground system development, mission operations and science data analysis. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in , managed Kepler mission development. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo., developed the Kepler flight system and supports mission operations with the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore archives, hosts and distributes Kepler science data. Kepler is NASA’s 10th Discovery Mission and was funded by the agency’s Science Mission Directorate.