brian, Thanks for helping me discover this part...

brian, Thanks for helping me discover this part of the blog.

Here is one thing I don't understand about this "quandary" over the presence or absence of soil moisture. Isn't adsorbed water ALWAYS present in a mixture of ice and other minerals? See:

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/geomars2001/pdf/7057.pdf

Here's a quote:

"Another observation is that any ice that forms in the soil-water system is separated from the mineral surface of the soil by liquid water. Beskow [1] was one of the first to realize the existence and importance of the un-frozen film in groundfreezing mechanics. The origin of the unfrozen water is a combination of the adsorption force emanating from the mineral surface along with other physical properties of the ice surface that requires a liquid transition layer on the surface of the
ice."

Maybe the above is somehow not true for Mars. So far Phoenix hasn't imaged any ice but what looks like fairly pure ice. Maybe mixtures of ice and soil are much more unstable than ice and rapidly lose all their water, but that doesn't explain the sticky soil apparently getting less sticky after it is exposed unless there is adsorbed water present to begin with.