NASA Hosts June 4 Media Briefing On Next Solar Mission Launch

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May 29, 2013, 02:13 ET

WASHINGTON, May 29, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA will host a news briefing at 1 p.m. EDT, Tuesday, June 4, about the upcoming launch of the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) mission. The briefing will be held at NASA Headquarters at 300 E St. SW in Washington and air live on NASA Television and the agency's website.

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IRIS is scheduled to launch June 26 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

IRIS is a NASA Small Explorer Mission to observe how solar material moves, gathers energy, and heats up as it travels through a little-understood region in the sun's lower atmosphere. This interface region between the sun's photosphere and corona powers its dynamic million-degree atmosphere and drives the solar wind. The region is the origin of most of the ultraviolet solar emission that impacts the near-Earth space environment and Earth's climate.

The panelists for the briefing are:

Jeffrey Newmark, IRIS program scientist, NASA Headquarters, Washington
Alan Title, IRIS principal investigator, Lockheed Martin's Advanced Technology Center, Palo Alto, Calif.
Gary Kushner, IRIS program manager, Lockheed Martin's Advanced Technology Center, Palo Alto, Calif.
John Marmie, IRIS assistant project manager, NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.

Journalists unable to attend in person may ask questions from participating NASA locations, join by phone, or send questions to Twitter using the hashtag #askNASA. To participate by phone, reporters must contact Steve Cole at 202-358-0918 or [email protected] with their media affiliation by 10 a.m., June 4.

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

For more information about the IRIS mission, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/iris

SOURCE NASA