It's a really crucial time for ideas of water on Mars. Every day, just about, the Rovers are turning up new paradoxes that are almost impossible to interpret in the standard paradigm of a Blue Mars.

Today, for instance, the Mossbauer spectrometer results from the meridiani site were released, showing a strong olivine signature. Now, it's *possible* that the olivine is fine dust blown in globally - it looks a lot like the dust at Gusev, for instance. But this has a couple of problems:-

1) If the surface of Mars is covered with a global layer of olivine dust, then there have essentially never been any mild spells for a considerable time - tens to hundreds of millions of years, and perhaps billions. That's no dew, no temporary thaws, nothing. That isn't the view that people keep forcing on Mars

2) Alternatively, if this is not imported dust (and remember that Meridiani is an area of nett erosion and exhumation of the haematite terrain, so local production of fines should dominate over imports, in the long run), then it says that the local materials in Meridiani are olivine-bearing, which is incompatible with any aqueous model for the origin of the haematite.

What we haven't studied adequately is how surface materials might behave on a dead dry planet.

Consider two issues:- The "superoxide" chemistry suggested by the Viking labelled release experiment (and recently reported from the Atacama desert on earth, too)

- The apparent formation of haematite surface films on grains and aggregates in the haematite area. (look at today's airbag print picture and see how the haeatite is destroyed by a mere "space hopper"). I agree the case is not closed here, we may yet find haematite in the rocks or other areas that doesn't crush, but the odds are getting long against it.

There's probably a link of sorts. In both cases, normally unstable phases seem to be generated from irradiated fine particulates. You've got everything going for you - large surface area, damaged crystals, UV X-ray, solar proton, & cosmic ray bombardment, and a thin atmosphere with a trace of reactive volatiles.

Oh, and what about the "Magic Carpet"?

Are the dark dust streaks on hillsides simply places where the magic carpet came loose?

This sort of research has never been done adequately, "because it's not interesting"

Now we just spent US$820 million and found some answeres by accident while we were playing the game of Twenty Questions in an ass-about manner.

Give 100 research teams $8.2 million and see how much you learn!

[This latter isn't quite fair, we didn't know quite what topics to research, but I think there are some VERY strong hints now]