...just not much of it.

One should remember several things in considering any public relations release from NASA concerning water on Mars.

First off, the idea of another Earth-like habitable planet has been the driver for the manned space program from its inception, and one only has to look at the von Braun - Disney television shows to see that. (They've been available in the Library of Congress film room since their broadcast. I wish Disney would re-release them, maybe as a boxed set.)

Keeping the institutional bias in mind, the spectrometer has not been calibrated yet, the orbit has not been circularized, and the spectrometer only measures the first meter of deposits.
Given the data that was obtained, with hopes for more of it and better, what you have here is the same situation as Lunar Prospector. For the Moon, the depth of possible water deposits at the lunar poles is completely unknown, as is whether the data is an artifact of observation, or of some other physical process. The same statements hold true for Mars, regardless of peoples' desires.

Whatever the case, it is not likely that the laws of physics will be overturned by the new data, including the gas laws. Given that desires influence perception, it is unlikely that those perceptions will be changed by anything less than data from long range rovers.

EP