Reporters are invited to attend NASA’s Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Mission Social event at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. on Friday, April 12. The daylong event celebrates the many successful and ongoing missions between NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

Held on the Friday before a weekend of events at the National Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington, the event begins with a live NASA TV broadcast from 10:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. EDT. Journalists unable to attend in-person can follow the event on NASA TV and ask questions via Twitter using the hashtag #askNASA.

A highlight of this NASA Social will be discussion of the science and engineering of the GPM mission, an international satellite mission to be launched by JAXA from its Tanegashima Space Center in Japan in early 2014.

GPM will provide rain and snow measurements of unprecedented accuracy worldwide, every three hours and deliver three-dimensional views of rain inside hurricanes and typhoons. GPM will also for the first time, provide us with information on falling snow from space. At the event, scientists will discuss how GPM will set new standards for precipitation measurements worldwide using an international network of satellites unified by the GPM Core Observatory, a satellite built by NASA that incorporates an instrument built by JAXA as well as one built by NASA. The satellite is currently being tested at NASA Goddard, and NASA and JAXA engineers will speak about the challenges in building, shipping and testing GPM.

A NASA Social event is an informal meeting of people who use social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Participants at this event will be provided a unique in-person experience with NASA, which they are encouraged to share with others through their favorite social network.
Following the NASA TV broadcast, reporters can attend additional presentations by NASA and partner organization scientists and engineers, and take tours of NASA Goddard’s unique facilities including:

* The world’s largest clean room
* NASA Goddard’s ‘Chamber of Horrors’ where satellites are tested to withstand the rigors of spaceflight.
* The ‘robot arm room’ where NASA’s Robotic Refueling Mission facility recently constructed and successfully deployed a refueling demonstration on the International Space Station.
* The construction and integration of a Japanese instrument as part of NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission, where four identical spacecraft will orbit Earth making three-dimensional measurements of its magnetosphere.
* A discussion of the latest science discoveries about our sun from the NASA/JAXA Hinode mission, launched in 2006.
* The Astrobiology Laboratory where we search for signs of life beyond Earth.
* Components of the James Webb Space Telescope, which will be the most powerful space telescope ever built. Webb’s four instruments will reveal how the universe evolved from the Big Bang to the formation of our solar system.

For NASA TV streaming video, downlink and scheduling information, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

For more information about the GPM mission visit: http://www.nasa.gov/gpm