NASA Hosts Media Briefing To Discuss Kepler Planetary Discovery

WASHINGTON, April 15, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA will host a news briefing at 2 p.m. EDT, Thursday, April 18, to announce new discoveries from the agency's Kepler mission.

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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.

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

SOURCE NASA