NASA's Curiosity rover has recently provided weather and soil data of Mars to scientists, which helped them get their first indirect evidence that a thin briny film is present near the equator.

A natural anti-freeze helps the brine to pull water from the atmosphere into the soil. But liquid evaporates as daytime temperatures are too high.

Scientists have been making efforts for long to find evidence that life once existed on Mars and robotic probes have also been launched in the past to help in the endeavor.

The Mars Science Laboratory, which is also known as Curiosity rover, landed on the surface of Mars in 2012 after it was launched by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Since then, the rover has been analyzing samples to provide more details about the Red Planet.

Presence of perchlorate in Martian soil has been confirmed by both Curiosity and NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander mission. Water absorption from the atmosphere becomes possible with the help of the perchlorate. It also enables to lower the freezing temperature of water. Many researchers have claimed for years that this mechanism exists on Mars and so does transient liquid brines at higher latitudes on modern Mars, despite cold and dry conditions on modern Mars.

More than a year's worth of temperature and humidity measurements data was collected by Curiosity.

"Liquid water is a requirement for life as we know it, and a target for Mars exploration missions. Conditions near the surface of present-day Mars are hardly favorable for microbial life as we know it, but the possibility for liquid brines on Mars has wider implications for habitability and geological water-related processes", said Javier Martin-Torres of the Spanish Research Council, Spain, and Lulea University of Technology, Sweden, and a member of Curiosity's science team.

Curiosity's Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS) collected the weather data, which was published in Nature's Geosciences journal.