NASA Hosts Media Teleconference to Announce Latest Kepler Discoveries

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Feb 21, 2014, 01:55 ET

WASHINGTON, Feb. 21, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA will host a news teleconference at 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.

For dial-in information, media should e-mail their name, affiliation and telephone number to J.D. Harrington at [email protected] no later than noon, Wednesday.

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

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

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SOURCE NASA