Scientists have confirmed on Monday that liquid water is flowing on the surface of Mars. The discovery could raise chances of life on the planet. According to the scientists, they used the United States space agency’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to find strong evidence of water on the Red Planet. The evidence showed that briny water routinely flows on the surface of the planet, they added.

Writing in the journal Nature Geoscience, scientists said the discovered water source is salty, but it has strengthened the possibilities of life on the fourth planet from the sun. Before this discovery, scientists thought that Mars had water long time ago, but now they have found that the planet is still wet.

John Grunsfeld, NASA's Science Mission Directorate associate administrator, said the presence of water has suggested that life could be possible even today on Mars. Lujendra Ojha, a scientist from the Georgia Institute of Technology and lead author of new study, said this is the first time when flowing water has been found on the Red Planet.

Ashwin Vasavada, project scientist for the Mars rover Curiosity, said the discovery of water is exciting, but not surprising. “What seemed really unbelievable 10 years ago — that Mars has modern, liquid water — has slowly become more and more an expectation. And to have the evidence that that team found today is fantastic”. Vasavada was not part of the new study.

“It’s incredibly exciting,” said Bethany Ehlmann, a planetary geologist at Caltech who was not involved in the new research. “When we look back at the broad scope of Mars history, it’s always in the past where there’s evidence for the most water. But if there’s liquid water even today … that says that there was probably liquid water for all of the last 4.5 billion years, just like there was on Earth.”