NASA Hosts Media Teleconference to Announce Latest Kepler Discovery

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-- WITH PHOTO -- TO NATIONAL, AND SCIENCE EDITORS:

NASA Hosts Media Teleconference to Announce Latest Kepler Discovery

WASHINGTON, April 15, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA will host a

news teleconference at 2 p.m. EDT Thursday, April 17, to announce a

new discovery made by its planet-hunting mission, the Kepler Space

Telescope.

The journal Science has embargoed the findings until the time of the

news conference.

The briefing participants are:

-- Douglas Hudgins, exoplanet exploration program scientist, NASA's

Astrophysics Division in Washington

-- Elisa Quintana, research scientist, SETI Institute at NASA's Ames

Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.

-- Tom Barclay, research scientist, Bay Area Environmental Research

Institute at Ames

-- Victoria Meadows, professor of astronomy at the University of

Washington, Seattle, and principal investigator for the Virtual

Planetary Laboratory, a team in the NASA Astrobiology Institute at

Ames

Launched in March 2009, Kepler is the first NASA mission capable of

finding 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, including those in the habitable zone. 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 j.d.harrington@nasa.gov no

later than noon Thursday.

The public is invited to listen to the teleconference live on UStream

at:

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nasa-arc

Audio of the teleconference also will be streamed live at:

http://www.nasa.gov/newsaudio

Questions can be submitted on Twitter using the hashtag #AskNASA.

A link to relevant graphics will be posted at the start of the

teleconference on NASA's Kepler site:

http://www.nasa.gov/kepler

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO

SOURCE NASA

-0- 04/15/2014

/CONTACT: J.D. Harrington, Headquarters, Washington, 202-358-5241. j.d.harrington@nasa.gov; or Michele Johnson, Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., 650-604-6982, michele.johnson@nasa.gov

/Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO

PRN Photo Desk photodesk@prnewswire.com

/Web Site: http://www.nasa.gov

CO: NASA

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