Martian dust / soil

Back in 1990, I had just graduated from high school and was working for Bill Borucki at NASA Ames.  I wrote a report on Martian Dust and electrical charge/discharge.  I remember working so hard on that report trying to figure out how to do background research and digging through the NASA libraries.  For all that hard work, I didn't end up with much.  My report is painful to read now.  It's full of typos and doesn't actually say much.  Now we have wikipedia and there are these:

• Palagonite
• Category:Smectite_group /  Montmorillonite
• Triboluminescence / Thermoluminescence
• Martian_meteorite
• Point discharge
• Photoelectric effect

And so on and so forth...

How sandstorms generate spectacular lightning displays : Why do Particle Clouds Generate Electric Charges?

Grains in desert sandstorms spontaneously generate strong electrical charges; likewise volcanic dust plumes produce spectacular lightning displays. Charged particle clouds also cause devastating explosions in food, drug and coal processing industries. Despite the wide-ranging importance of granular charging in both nature and industry, even the simplest aspects of its causes remain elusive, because it is difficult to understand how inert grains in contact with little more than other inert grains can generate the large charges observed. Here, we present a simple yet predictive explanation for the charging of granular materials in collisional flows. We argue from very basic considerations that charge transfer can be expected in collisions of identical dielectric grains in the presence of an electric field, and we confirm the model's predictions using discrete-element simulations and a tabletop granular experiment.