NASA will host a news teleconference at 1 p.m. EST, Wednesday, Feb. 26, to announce new discoveries made by its planet-hunting mission, the Kepler Space Telescope.

The briefing participants are:

-- Douglas Hudgins, exoplanet exploration program scientist, NASA's Astrophysics Division in Washington
-- Jack Lissauer, planetary scientist, NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
-- Jason Rowe, research scientist, SETI Institute, Mountain View, Calif.
-- Sara Seager, professor of planetary science and physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass.

Launched in March 2009, Kepler was the first NASA mission to find 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. 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, Wednesday. Questions can be submitted on Twitter using the hashtag #AskNASA.

The public is invited to listen to the teleconference live via UStream, at:

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

A link to relevant graphics will be posted at the start of the teleconference on NASA's Kepler site:

http://www.nasa.gov/kepler

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