NASA will hold a press conference on June 19 where it will discuss its latest findings from the Kepler telescope. Kepler, which is on its second mission known as K2, has so far revealed 667 planet candidates to ground control since it embarked on the second phase. In its new mission, the spacecraft is focussing on red dwarf stars, which are much cooler and smaller than our sun, and are in abundance in our galaxy.
The press conference will kick off at 10am EST where NASA will “announce the latest planet candidate results from the agency's exoplanet-hunting Kepler mission. The briefing, taking place during the Kepler Science Conference, will be held at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley.
NASA said in a statement:
“The latest Kepler catalog of planet candidates was created using the most sophisticated analyses yet, yielding the most complete and reliable accounting of distant worlds to date. This survey will enable new lines of research in exoplanet study, which looks at planets outside our solar system.”
Among the attendees at the conference will be Mario Perez, Kepler program scientist in the Astrophysics Division of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Susan Mullally, Kepler research scientist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View and Benjamin Fulton, doctoral candidate at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and the California Institute of Technology.