Image: Artist's rendering of Kepler's Transit Method of Detecting Extrasolar Planets. SETI Institute.

Alycia Weinberger will participate in a NASA media teleconference tomorrow at 1 p.m. EDT to discuss an intriguing planetary system that is the latest discovery of the Kepler spacecraft. Other participants include Jon Morse, Astrophysics Division Director, NASA Headquarters; William Borucki, Kepler Mission science principal investigator of NASA Ames Research Center; and Matthew Holman, associate director of the Theoretical Astrophysics Division of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

The Kepler Mission is designed to survey our region of the Milky Way galaxy to discover hundreds of Earth-size and smaller planets in or near the habitable zone and determine the fraction of the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy that might have such planets. Scientists announced in June that the Kepler Mission has identified more than 700 planet candidates, including five candidate systems that appear to have more than one transiting planet.

To hear live audio of the teleconference, click here. See the NASA Web site for more information about Kepler.