Hello Nick -

I suppose old habits die hard - I have seen so much bad watery Mars science supported at such great expense for so many years that I am very sceptical -

I met Mitraanov at Sagdeev at 70, and asked him if the team had taken the persisting radiation environment into account - he assured me that they had, but naturally my doubts still remained - good to hear they actually worked it through

"Trust me, this *REALLY* is H in the shallow regolith (<1m). "

Yeah, you can see the small water outflow channels from the smaller impacts, and if this teams' findings are correct, the existence and size of those water outflow channels should map well with their water maps. That said, the problem is that H2O is going to split into H and O when irradiated...

"As for "radioactive environment", the WHOLE PURPOSE of the HEND and GRS experiments is to USE that surface bombardment to measure what is there. They acknowledge the radiation flux, and measure its consequences. To date, they do NOT report large amounts of unstable daughter products of that bombardment. "

Nick, the C14 load has to be incredible, and that C14 has to incorporated into any Martian life form, if any should exist. While the discharged neutron speed may be low, it would be right in the DNA, if any should exist.

"Such products are volumetrically minor, although useful for age dating of exposed surface."

Very good news. If we can get accurate dating of the large impact basins, then we can get accurate time of accretion for the counts for the smaller impacts within them. The small impact rate estimates of responsible scientists currently vary by nearly 2 orders of magnitude, and getting this number nailed down fast is essential to ensuring public safety.

"On ages, Claudia Quantin looked at the apparent surface age of Landslides in V.M. and showed that 1) Similar processes applied to modern and ancient slides, so all are either dry or wet, and ground water conditions have not changed over time. Furthermore, an apparent acceleration in the rate of slides with time is more likely an error in the (Hartmann) chronology for crater ages. Using Neukum ages leads to a neat straight line trend of occurence vs time."

Is this "Hartmann" NASA OSS's Colleen Hartmann?

When the releases of CO2 and water occur due to massive impact, say every 26 million years or so chaotically, its going to go done the same features as earlier - like V.M. What period of time was covered here?

The keys forme are the dates of the Hellas impact and Tharsis formation -

"Look, for instance, at the cosmic-ray exposure ages of the SNC meteorites which tell us how long it took for them to float around in space before they encountered the Earth, and how long it was since they fell"

I seem to recall the two other dates, ejection and fall, were deterrined from shocked quartz and crust degeneration - this was covered on the meteorite list, and gone through there in depth - I have it lying around somewhere on my home computer -

Length of cosmic ray exposure is the problem - without much of a magnetic shield, the SNCs should have been bombarded while on the surface of Mars, as well as when they were in free space - I don't believe the dates were ever adjusted.

"Lots of workers showed that an altered basalt mineralogy would match the "andesite" spectra, although little agreement on the nature of alteration. Various authors plausibly proposed sheet silicates, zeolites, palagonite, or glass."

The SNCs are actual samples of Mars. I see all too many references to "lavas", which are commonly understodd by lay men to indicate glasses - often in these cases, from effects the small impacts, one can see that what was hit was not a "glass" - more like a "pyroclastic" mud, to use a layman's terminology. Not being a geologist, (no s***), I can't come up with a better word, but the stuff is the result of your clathrates pulverized at depth and then flowing back out onto the surface - still no understanding of the Martian "fault" system -

I hope Malin gave you a delivery date for the re-imaging of the area of your polar CO2 outflows, and many thanks for your generous gift of your time -

ep