Hello Nick,

I see by the LPI meeting papers that some progress is finally being made in counting the craters on the surfaces of other bodies.

The most interesting for me was the crater count done on some of Mars "pristine" surfaces, Unfortunately, the samples' observed small to medium impact rates still diverged by an order of magnitude. In addition, we have no idea of the time scale, as the dates of the formation of each individua sample area's "pristine surface" is unknown.

SWRI has a part of the automated crater counting software in hand. It is now a question of applying it and developing it further.

The software needs to be applied to the Galileo data for Jupiter's moons, and the new datasets for Saturn's moons (very nice work there) are of particular importance, lying as they do outside of Jupiter.

The software is apparently not yet linked into elevation maps, so ideas of the total areas excavated by each impact are not yet found automatically. This type of information may be of importance in sorting out impacts by the different types of asteroids and comets.

In the Mars data, I see that the spectra data is just now being de-biased for the ever present hematite dust from iron meteorite impact.

Of importance to you, some are beginning to realize that the very minimal annual atmospheric water cycle on Mars is biasing their estimates as to total subsurface water.

that's my take on it - it only took 5 years of nagging, and particularly the nagging of some senior astronauts, to finally get NASA off its *ss. With a couple more years of effort at this level, we should finally have reliable estimates of the small to medium impact risk.

ed