NASA To Announce It Has Found Aliens… Maybe

In March of 2009, NASA launched the Kepler spacecraft with the specific mission of cataloging planets that could possibly be a home to extraterrestrial life. On Thursday April 18th, 2013, NASA will announce something…

“The centuries-old quest for other worlds like our Earth has been rejuvenated by the intense excitement and popular interest surrounding the discovery of hundreds of planets orbiting other stars,” NASA says in the Kepler section of its Web site. “The challenge now is to find terrestrial planets.”

NASA is holding a Kepler briefing at 11 a.m. PT on Thursday. It will be broadcast live on NASA Television and on UStream. The agency will also host a moderated Web chat with Kepler Deputy Project Scientist Nick Gautier of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. During the briefing, people can submit questions to the Kepler scientists via Twitter with the hashtag #AskNASA

The briefing participants include:

— Paul Hertz, astrophysics director, NASA Headquarters, Washington
— Roger Hunter, Kepler project manager, Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
— William Borucki, Kepler science principal investigator, Ames Research Center
— 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.