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New data from NASA's Curiosity rover indicate Mars Crater once held an enormous lake. This discovery suggests that the red planet may have been much wetter than scientists thought and raises the possibility that the planet was once habitable.

“The size of the lake and the length of time and series that water was showing up implies that there may have been sufficient time for life to develop.” NASA's Mars Exploration Program scientist Dr. Michael Meyer told Reuters.

Curiosity collected the new data on its five-mile drive to Mount Sharp, the prime destination on its mission to study Mars' climate and geography. The rover landed in Gale Crater in August 2012.

After reaching Mount Sharp in September, the rover spent two months studying rocks at the base of the three-mile-high mountain, discovering fine layers of mudstone--which tend to collect at the bottom of lakes. This shows how a mountain inside a Mars' Gale Crater might have formed.

"If our assumption for Mount Sharp holds up, it challenges the idea that warm and wet conditions were passing, local, or only underground on Mars,” Dr. Ashwin Vasavada said in a written statement. “A more radical explanation is that Mars' ancient, thicker atmosphere raised temperatures above freezing globally, but so far we don't know how the atmosphere did that."

Vasavada said curiosity will continue to study changes in the rock formation as it climbs Mount Sharp in the next few months, which should test the team's hypothesis..

"We'll also look at the chemistry of the rocks to see if the water that was once present would've been of the kind that could support microbial life, if it ever was present," he said in a video released by NASA. "With only 30 vertical feet of the mountain behind us, we're sure there's a lot more to discover."