United States Congresswomen Zoe Lofgren, CA visits with Ames Center Director Dr. Pete Worden and Director of StratCom Angela Diaz (l-r) Diaz, Worden, Lofgren

United States Congresswomen Zoe Lofgren, CA visits with Ames Center Director Dr. Pete Worden and Director of StratCom Angela Diaz (l-r) Diaz, Worden, Lofgren

Silicon Valley technology Festival Paco Rafageles, left and Dr Pete Worden, Director Ames Research Center, right sign documents seal it with a hand shake.

Silicon Valley technology Festival Paco Rafageles, left and Dr Pete Worden, Director Ames Research Center, right sign documents.

Ames 2012 Fellows Awards Dinner Honoring inductees Lousi J. Allamandola, Wayne R. Johnson, Baruch S. Blumberg and Hans Mark (showing Dr. Wayne Johnson and Pete Worden, Ames Director)

Ames 2012 Fellows Awards Dinner Honoring inductees Lousi J. Allamandola, Wayne R. Johnson, Baruch S. Blumberg and Hans Mark. Dr. Carl Pilcher accepting for Dr. Baruch Blumburg with Pete Worden, Ames Director presenting.

2010 NASA Honor Awards Awards Group Achievement Award to VMS Space Shuttle Visual Database Development Team. Boris M. Rabin accepting. Presenters are on left Mr. Charles H. Scales, NASA Associate Deputy Administrator, on right Dr. S. Pete Worden, Director, NASA Ames Research Center.

Netherlands Memorandum of Record (MOR) agreement signing the NASA Ames Research Center, Mofffett Field, California. Signing the MOR are on left Dr. Louis B.J.Vertegaal, Director of Physical Sciences, Chemistry, and Advanced Chemical Technologies for Sustainability, of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and on right Dr. S. Pete Worden, Director NASA Ames Research Center

VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. – At Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, NASA hosted a prelaunch mission briefing on the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, solar observatory scheduled to launch on a Pegasus XL rocket. Participating in the news conference are George Diller, NASA Public Affairs, Dr. S. Pete Worden, director of NASA's Ames Research Center in Calif., Jeffrey Newmark, IRIS Program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington D.C., and Alan Title, IRIS principal investigator with Lockheed Martin. Scheduled for launch from Vandenberg on June 26, 2013, IRIS will open a new window of discovery by tracing the flow of energy and plasma through the chromospheres and transition region into the sun’s corona using spectrometry and imaging. The IRIS mission will observe how solar material moves, gathers energy and heats up as it travels through a largely unexplored region of the solar atmosphere. The interface region, located between the sun's visible surface and upper atmosphere, is where most of the sun's ultraviolet emission is generated. These emissions impact the near-Earth space environment and Earth's climate. For more information, visit http://www.nasa.gov/iris Photo credit: NASA/ Daniel Casper