What did Curiosity Rover Find on Mars: Watch Live Event Here

NASA will be hosting a news conference Tuesday afternoon to announce the latest discoveries from the Curiosity rover on Mars.

The conference, which will be held at the agency's headquarters in Washington, will begin at 1 p.m. EDT (1700 GMT). It will be broadcast live on NASA's TV and webcast channels, a departure from recent teleconferences that have been a staple of Curiosity rover mission updates.

Curiosity rover, the mobile Martian science lab has been collecting soil samples for the past several weeks, searching for signs of life on the red planet.

NASA officials said the Tuesday press conference will "discuss the Curiosity rover's analysis of the first sample of rock powder ever collected on Mars."

The first sample drilling on Mars revealed an odd, gray interior of Martian rock that stood out in comparison to the orange-red surface of mars. Curiosity scooped up a sample of the gray rock powder and placed it inside two onboard laboratories, called the Chemistry and Mineralogy instrument and Sample Analysis at Mars, to determine its chemical makeup.

The rover landed on the Martian surface Aug. 6, 2012, is on a two-year mission to check if Martian land supports the existence of microbial life. It has been slow going since then as engineers learn to handle the rover. The $2.5 billion Curiosity is about the size of a car, making it the largest rover ever to explore Mars. It carries 10 different science instruments to study the Red Planet in unprecedented detail.

Watch the NASA conference on the latest Curiosty developments live in the video below:

Live broadcast by Ustream