WASHINGTON — NASA will hold a news conference on Wednesday, May 30, at 1 p.m. EDT to discuss the upcoming launch of the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), a mission to hunt for black holes. The event will be held in the James E. Webb Auditorium at NASA Headquarters located at 300 E St. SW in Washington.

The event will be broadcast live on NASA Television and streamed on the agency’s website.

NuSTAR will observe some of the hottest, densest and most energetic objects in the universe, including black holes, their high-speed particle jets, ultra-dense neutron stars, supernova remnants and our sun. It will observe high-energy X-rays with much greater sensitivity and clarity than any mission flown to date. Among its several goals, NuSTAR will address the puzzle of how black holes and galaxies evolve together over time.

NuSTAR is scheduled to launch no earlier than 11:30 a.m. EDT on June 13 from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The spacecraft will lift off on an Orbital Sciences Pegasus XL launch vehicle, released from an aircraft flying south of Kwajalein. Launch management and government oversight for the mission is the responsibility of NASA’s Launch Services Program at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

News conference participants are:

— Paul Hertz, Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington
— Fiona Harrison, NuSTAR principal investigator at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif.
— Daniel Stern, NuSTAR project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena
— Yunjin Kim, NuSTAR project manager at JPL

Reporters unable to attend the briefing in person can ask questions from other NASA centers, by telephone or via Twitter using the hashtag #asknasa.

For dial-in information, reporters should send their name, media affiliation and telephone number to j.d.harrington@nasa.gov by noon on May 30.

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

For more information about the NuSTAR mission, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/nustar