The planet-hunting Kepler telescope is NASA’s ambitious mission to scan more than 150,000 stars for signs of extraterrestrial life.
Since launching in 2009, Kepler has expanded our understanding of the far reaches of the cosmos and today could mark a new groundbreaking discovery.
NASA’s conference will kick off at 6pm GMT (1pm EST) tonight with appearance from the space agency’s top officials.
Audiences will be able to follow the conference live as it happens, through NASA’s streaming services.
Viewers can also head to Twitter to send in any burning questions they may have, under the hashtag #askNASA.
Paul Hertz, Astrophysics Division director at NASA HQ in Washington will join Google AI engineer Christopher Shallue, NASA astronomer Andrew Vanderburg and Kepler scientist Jessie Dotson for the conference today.
The American space agency has carefully tiptoed around the details of the event, but its last major announcement in February 2017 revealed the alien world of Trappist-1.
NASA has however teased the use of Google’s artificial intelligence algorithms in the upcoming finding.
The space agency said in a press release: “The discovery was made by researchers using machine learning from Google.
“Machine learning is an approach to artificial intelligence, and demonstrates new ways of analysing Kepler data.”
The £446million ($600million) telescope completed its mission in 2012 – three years after launch – even though scientists only expected the venture to last for a year.
Kepler has since continued to surprise astronomers by continuing to unveil alien worlds across the galaxy.
NASA said: “When Kepler launched in March 2009, scientists didn’t know how common planets were beyond our solar system.
“Thanks to Kepler’s treasure trove of discoveries, astronomers now believe there may be at least one planet orbiting every star in the sky.”
The amount of work needed to be done by Kepler, prompted a brand new assignment in 2014.
The K2 mission has since been on the search for exoplanets, supernovae and other cosmic phenomena.
As of June 2017, the telescope has discovered 2,335 confirmed planets and a whole raft of potential planet-like objects.
Soaring through space some 137 million km from Earth, it takes an incredible effort to collect data from the telescope.
According to Ms Dotson, it takes the Kepler about four to eight weeks to beam back the information it gathers.