How much do you know about Curiosity and its mission? (See also "Did Life on Earth Come From Mars?") No - Mars once had life, but those organisms are long dead. The rover team achieved that goal months ago, announcing in March that a spot near Curiosity's landing site called Yellowknife Bay was indeed habitable billions of years ago 
 
 The new results, which are reported today (Dec. 9) in six separate papers in the journal Science, confirm and extend Curiosity's landmark discovery, painting a more complete picture of the Yellowknife Bay area long ago. 0 of questions complete 
 
 The shallow ancient lake may have been about 30 miles long by 3 miles wide (50 by 5 kilometers), Grotzinger said. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. In another Science paper, RAD principal investigator Donald Hassler reports that the radiation would almost certainly be fatal within a few million years to any microbial life on the surface or less than several meters deep. NASA's Curiosity rover — the centerpiece of NASA's $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission — landed on Mars Aug. 5. "If we find that kind of formation," he said, "drill there."
– The Curiosity rover has discovered evidence of an ancient freshwater lake on Mars that was brimming with the key chemicals necessary to support microbial life, and its findings suggest that it could have held that life more recently than we thought—and possibly for millions of years before that. "Quite honestly it just looks very Earth-like," the Curiosity's lead scientist said, according to Space.com. The lake, located in the Gale Crater, would have been about 30 miles long and 3 miles wide. The lake's mudstones—which form in calm, still water—contain traces of sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and carbon, meaning it could have supported chemolithoautotrophs, a kind of microbial that obtains energy by breaking down rock minerals. The lake was revealed today amidst a barrage of papers on the Rover's progress. National Geographic breaks down some of the other key take-aways, including one that's less promising for Martian life hunters: Curiosity's first radiation measurements indicate levels that would be fatal, within a few million years, to anything within several meters of the surface. Though the researchers did note that some classes of bacteria might have been able to survive through long periods of hibernation.