The Curiosity rover of US space agency NASA has found new evidence that has suggested that Mars once had lakes, rivers and even oceans.

However, the Red planet we know today is a frozen wasteland that endures deadly bombardments of cosmic and solar radiation every single day. But the Mars of the past may have been dramatically different.

The Curiosity landed on Mars in 2012 and since then it has been performing experiments and analyzing the Martian surface to collect the evidence of life on Mars.

The rover functions as a sort of mobile laboratory and is equipped with a series of high-powered instruments, including microscope cameras and lasers.

It has detected a 96-mile depression that formed more than 3.5 billion years ago when a meteorite slammed into the planet.

The evidence it collected indicates that the huge crater might have once held a lake, and that aquatic sediment from that lake has transformed over time into a mountain 18,000 feet tall.

According to Tariq Malik, Managing Editor of Space.com, the mountain is called Mount Sharp and it rises three miles up from the floor of this crater.

He mentioned that scientists have planned to study the sediment layers to get a better picture of how the planet's climate and environment changed over time.

He said, "They want to see the evolution of this lake in the crater. They want to see how full it got, when it might have dried out to allow the winds to sculpt a three-mile mountain at its core, and then where that water went. It's perplexing to them right now".

He also pointed out that NASA's findings are only the beginning. The evidence uncovered by Curiosity and the theories scientists are pursuing have yet to be published in scientific journals.