NASA Media Call Previews Upcoming Mission to Explore Atmospheric Border

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Jan 23, 2018, 03:17 ET

WASHINGTON, Jan. 23, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA will host a media teleconference at 1 p.m. EST Wednesday, Jan. 24, to discuss the upcoming launch of the agency's mission to study where Earth's atmosphere meets space.

The Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk (GOLD) mission is NASA's first science mission to fly as a hosted instrument aboard a commercial communications satellite launching from French Guiana. The launch window opens at approximately 5:20 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 25.

Teleconference participants are:

Elsayed Talaat, heliophysics chief scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington
Richard Eastes, principal investigator at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado (CU) Boulder
Susan Batiste, systems engineer at LASP/CU
Katelynn Greer, GOLD research scientist at LASP/CU

For information to participate in the call, media should email their name and affiliation to Karen Fox, [email protected] by 12:45 p.m. Jan. 24.

The teleconference will stream live at:

https://www.nasa.gov/live

For visuals to support the briefing, mission video and other media resources, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/mediaresources

Live launch coverage will begin on NASA Television and the agency's website at 5 p.m. Jan. 25. Coverage will include live-streaming from the Guiana Space Centre launch site and briefings from LASP and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

GOLD will seek to understand what drives change in this region of the upper atmosphere where terrestrial weather in the lower atmosphere interacts with the tumult of solar activity from above, as well as Earth's magnetic field. Resulting data will improve forecasting models of space weather events that can impact radio communications and GPS signals, as well as satellites and astronauts in space.

The instrument will fly on SES-14, built by Airbus for SES S.A., a Luxembourg-based satellite operator. LASP built the instrument, and the mission is led by the University of Central Florida in Orlando.

To learn more about the GOLD mission, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/gold

SOURCE NASA