NASAs Mars Curiosity Rover finds Mount Sharp was once a huge lake

Mount Sharp on Mars was once home to huge lakes that remained for up to 10,000 years at a time - long enough to support life. This is the latest discovery by NASAs Curiosity Rover that had landed in Gale Crater in August 2012. The rock formations that have been photographed by the rover would suggest that long ago a transient water system of deltas and lakes had dominated the landscape of Gale Crater.
This has been reported in dailymail.co.uk dated 9 October 2015.

The images show evidence of sediments transported southward by shallow streams to the boundary of an ancient lake. It may be recalled that recently NASA scientists had confirmed that current water flows on Mars.
As explained by scientists - the Gale crater floor today is the lowest topographic depression for over 1,000-Km in any direction, including the northern plains. It seems water collected there, in surface and subsurface reservoirs. And that had been happening for a geologically and perhaps biologically relevant period of time.
Moreover, observations from the rover tend to suggest that a series of long-lived streams and lakes existed at some point between about 3.8 to 3.3 billion years ago. These delivered sediment that slowly built up the lower layers of Mount Sharp.
Obviously, a conclusion can be reached that there were ancient lakes on Mars.
(Image courtesy wikimediacommons.org)

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NASAs Curiosity rover finds a 96-mile-wide crater, possibly a dried up lake, on Mars

NASAs Curiosity is on track to solve the mystery of whether Mars, the Red Planet, ever had water on it. Hence, its latest find of a huge 96-mile (154-Km) wide crater tends to lend credence to the theory that Mars indeed had water, plenty of it, in the form of lakes.
Scientists have discovered stacks of rocks that contain sediments that appear to have been deposited by water and these are inclined toward the center of the crater – this now reveals a three-mile (5 km) mound called Mount Sharp. Therefore, it is quite possible that Mount Sharp was not there during a period of time roughly 3.5 billion years ago when the crater was filled with water.
Of course, researchers are baffled as to why Mount Sharp that stands about 3 miles (5 kilometers) tall with its lower flanks exposing hundreds of rock layers, sits in a crater.
From these latest findings, a conclusion can be drawn that billions of years ago, a lake once filled this huge crater and as NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity continues to dig up new data, they bolster the thinking that the Red planet was most like the Earth in the solar system and was suitable for microbial life.
These new findings combine more than two years of data collected by the rover since its sky-crane landing inside Gale Crater in August 2012. NAA has plans to send humans to Mars by 2030 and results of such studies could throw up probable areas that would need to be focused upon.