NASA regularly releases news, scientific papers, and new theories related to Mars, and typically it’s with very little fanfare. Scientists have lots of hardware working around the clock to probe the Red Planet’s mysteries, and not every minor detail is worthy of a big show. So, when NASA announces that it has something special to tell everyone about it’s pretty exciting. Today, the agency will be holding a press conference to reveal something that it’s discovered about Mars, and you can watch it live.
The press conference is set to kick off at 2 p.m. EDT today, and while NASA obviously hasn’t revealed exactly what it has in store, there’s a few things we do know.
NASA says the announcement has something to do with “new science results from NASA’s Curiosity rover,” which tells us quite a bit about what the news might be. Curiosity has had a somewhat rough go of things over the past few months, breaking its drilling mechanism and having to totally relearn how to use its tool in a new way so that it can continue to pierce Martian rocks.
Just a couple of weeks ago, NASA announced that Curiosity had successfully drilled a hole using this new technique, and its handlers were excited that the rover could get back to work. Using its drill, Curiosity takes samples of Mars and analyzes them in its onboard laboratory, sending the results back to NASA for further examination. The fact that the rover had a long period of downtime before it got its drill back online suggests that whatever this new discovery is, it was made quite recently.
In any case, NASA doesn’t hold these kinds of press conferences very often so it’s worth checking in to see the new developments. The livestream should kick off shortly before the press conference is scheduled to begin, and as with all NASA events it will be live streamed so we can all enjoy it from the comfort of our office desks. You can watch it via the embedded YouTube window above, or on NASA’s Twitch stream.
