re: "White House Briefed On Potential For Mars Life" - something beyond the water results.
After the Viking results fiasco and the Mars meteorite hype, you'd think that NASA would be very cautious even touting something as innocuous as discovering possible extant 'begnin habitability conditions'. Then again, maybe not.
Glad as I am with the excellent real results discovered so far, did anyone here believe that there was NOT H2O frozen beneath Martian polar soil??? The only risk post landing besides eqpt failure was that somehow P landed in a micro-desert spot or atop a rock mesa devois of soil.