NASA will host a news conference at 8 a.m. PDT (11 a.m. EDT) Thursday, March 21, to discuss the first cosmology results from Planck, a European Space Agency mission with significant NASA participation.

The briefing will be held at NASA Headquarters in Washington. It will be broadcast live on NASA Television and streamed on the agency’s website.

Planck launched into space in 2009 and has been scanning the skies ever since, mapping cosmic microwave background, or the afterglow, of the big bang that created our universe more than 13 billion years ago.

The briefing participants are:

— Paul Hertz, director of astrophysics, NASA, Washington
— Charles Lawrence, U.S. Planck project scientist, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL),
Pasadena, Calif.
— Martin White, U.S. Planck scientist, University of California, Berkeley, Calif.
— Krzysztof Gorski, U.S. Planck scientist, JPL
— Marc Kamionkowski, professor of physics and astronomy, John Hopkins University, Baltimore,
Md.

News media representatives may ask questions from participating NASA centers or by telephone.

Local media who would like to watch the event at JPL, via satellite, must arrange access by 2 p.m. PDT on Wednesday, March 20, by contacting elena.mejia@jpl.nasa.gov or JPL Media Relations at 818-354-5011. Valid photo I.D. and media credentials are required, and non-U.S. citizens must also bring a passport.

To participate by phone, reporters must send an email providing name, media affiliation and telephone number to j.d.harrington@nasa.gov by 7 a.m. PDT (10 a.m. EDT) March 21. News media representatives and the public may send questions via Twitter to #AskNASA.

For NASA TV streaming video, scheduling and downlink information, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/ntv . The event will also be streamed live on Ustream at: http://www.ustream.tv/nasajpl2 .

Planck is a European Space Agency mission, with significant participation from NASA. NASA’s Planck Project Office is based at JPL. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, contributed mission-enabling technology for both of Planck’s science instruments. European, Canadian and U.S. Planck scientists work together to analyze the Planck data. More information is online at http://www.nasa.gov/planck, http://planck.caltech.edu and http://www.esa.int/planck .