Press Release

NASA Joins 'Around the World in 80 Telescopes'

April 02, 2009

PASADENA, Calif. — A collection of NASA missions will be involved in a live event Friday, April 3, that will allow the public to get an inside look at how these missions are run. "Around the World in 80 Telescopes" is a 24-hour webcast that is part of the "100 Hours of Astronomy" event for the International Year of Astronomy 2009.

During the webcast, viewers will be able to visit some of the most advanced telescopes on and off the planet. For NASA's space-based missions, the webcast will be broadcast from control centers throughout the United States. To view the webcast, visit http://100hoursofastronomy.org.

As part of the webcast, most of the missions will release a never-before-seen image from the telescope or observatory. The new images can be found on the Web sites listed below. Please note these times correspond to the beginning of each mission's segment on the live webcast and when each new image will be available.

The NASA missions participating in the webcast, in chronological order, are (times are Pacific Daylight Time, April 3):

Hubble Space Telescope: 10:20 a.m.

Swift Gamma-ray Burst Explorer: 10:40 a.m.

Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope: 11 a.m.

SOHO and TRACE: 12:20 p.m.

STEREO: 12:40 p.m.

Galaxy Evolution Explorer: 1:20 p.m.

Chandra X-ray Observatory: 1:40 p.m.

Spitzer Space Telescope: 2:20 p.m.

Kepler: 12:05 a.m. (April 4)

For information about the International Year of Astronomy, visit http://astronomy2009.nasa.gov/.

For more information about NASA and agency programs, visit http://www.nasa.gov.

Caltech leads the Galaxy Evolution Explorer mission and is responsible for science operations and data analysis. JPL manages the mission and built the science instrument. The mission was developed under NASA's Explorers Program managed by the Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. Researchers sponsored by Yonsei University in South Korea and the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) in France collaborated on this mission.

Media Contacts:
Whitney Clavin 818-354-4673
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.