NASA BFG ON RECENT FINDINGS ABOUT JUPITER’S MOON EUROPA, May 14, 2018, DC, 1:00 pm ET (webcast)

NASA will hold a “Science Chat” on May 14, 2018 at 1:00 pm ET to discuss the latest analysis of Jupiter’s moon Europa “and its status as one of the most promising places in the solar system to search for life.”

The briefing will be available via several methods: NASA Television, Facebook Live, Twitch TV, Ustream, YouTube, Twitter/Periscope and the agency’s website.

Briefing participants are:

Lori Glaze, acting director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division (PSD), and JoAnna Wendel, PSD communications lead, will host the chat. Guests include:

• Xianzhe Jia, associate professor in the Department of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
• Elizabeth Turtle, research scientist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland
• Margaret Kivelson, professor emerita of Space Physics in the Department of Earth and Space Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles

On Wednesday (May 9), Rep. John Culberson (R-TX), chairman of the Commerce-Justice-Science subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee and an enthusiastic advocate for sending probes to study Europa, inadvertently broke an embargo on an article that will be published in the journal Nature Astronomy about new findings regarding Europa from NASA’s Galileo spacecraft.  At the markup of the FY2019 CJS bill, which includes NASA, he had a copy of the article and handed it to full committee chairman Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NJ) and summarized what it said.

The article is embargoed until May 14 at 11:00 am ET.  SpacePolicyOnline.com was not provided with the embargoed copy of the article so is under no obligation to refrain from repeating Rep. Culberson’s comments, but will not in case some of you would rather wait for the official unveiling.  For those of you who don’t, here is the link to the video of the markup.  Culberson’s comments begin at about 5:30.