NASA Hosts NASA TV News Briefing on Upcoming Mars Mission

NASA will host a news briefing at 2 p.m. EDT Monday, Oct. 28, to discuss the upcoming launch of the agency's next mission to Mars and the first devoted to understanding the upper atmosphere of the Red Planet.

The briefing on the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission will take place at NASA Headquarters, 300 E St. SW in Washington, and air live on NASA Television and the agency's website.

MAVEN is scheduled to launch at 1:28 p.m. EST Nov. 18 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. MAVEN's data will be used to study the history and change of Mars’ atmosphere, climate, and planetary habitability.
Briefing participants are:

- John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters, Washington
- Jim Green, director, Planetary Science Division, Headquarters
- Lisa May, MAVEN program executive, Headquarters
- Kelly Fast, MAVEN program scientist, Headquarters
- Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN principal investigator, University of Colorado Boulder Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics
- David Mitchell, MAVEN project manager, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

Journalists unable to attend in person may ask questions from participating NASA locations, join by phone, or send questions via Twitter using the hashtag #askNASA. To participate by phone, reporters must contact Steve Cole at stephen.e.cole@nasa.gov with their media affiliation by 1 p.m. Monday.

For NASA TV streaming video, downlink and scheduling information, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/nasatv

For more information about the mission, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/maven

and

http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/maven/

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Media Invited to NASA Google+ Hangout Briefing on Antarctic Ice Campaign

NASA will host a live Google+ Hangout news conference on Tuesday, Oct. 29 at 3 p.m. EDT about Operation IceBridge's upcoming airborne field campaign in Antarctica.

This is the first year IceBridge will operate directly from Antarctica, flying from McMurdo Station starting in mid-November instead of from southern Chile. This change will allow IceBridge researchers to survey parts of Antarctica previously unavailable to them since the mission began in 2009.

IceBridge is a multi-year NASA science mission to study ice conditions at both poles. The mission's survey flights gather data on changes in ice elevation and thickness and measure the shape of bedrock and water cavities beneath ice using a suite of scientific instruments. The mission provides critical measurements that bridge the gap between observations supplied by NASA's Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite, or ICESat, and the upcoming ICESat-2.

Panelists for this briefing are:

-- Michael Studinger, IceBridge project scientist, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
-- Christy Hansen, IceBridge project manager, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
-- Chad Naughton, project manager, National Science Foundation's U.S. Antarctic Program, Centennial, Colo.

The Hangout will be broadcast on NASA Goddard's Google+ and YouTube pages and carried live on NASA Television and the agency's website. Journalists can submit questions via comments on these pages or on Twitter using the hashtag #IceBridge.

To join the Hangout, visit:

http://go.nasa.gov/HjmQOk

For NASA TV downlink, schedule and streaming video information, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/nasatv

For more information about Operation IceBridge, visit:

www.nasa.gov/icebridge

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