Beautiful stuff Horton! Thanks!The "jo...

Beautiful stuff Horton! Thanks!

The "jolt of current that makes the soil move" might be a change in static electricity. The probe is probably grounded or is it? Whether it is grounded or not... it has batteries and current running through it constantly.
It is inevitable that the probe has it's own static charge which can react with the adjacent martian grains. Opposites attract,... like charges repel...right? Just like a magnet...I think.

Noticable forces of static attraction/repulsion that move grains might not be that unusual in such a low humidity.

I was talking about this static thing before and suggested we might be seeing a kind of (what I'm calling) a beanbag particle repulsion/attraction phenomena.

People that lived through the seventies might recall the bean bag chair. It's a kind of squishy roundish thing you sit in).
They used to be filled with small styrofoam balls the size of BBs of smaller (BB gun BBs)

If you ever pop a big hole in these beanbag chairs when it is very dry in your house the little styrofoam balls will spill out.

When you try to clean up the mess there will be little balls of styrofoam attracted to your hand and other balls of styrofoam that will be repelled by your hand. Some of those little styrofoam bits are almost impossible to grab until you chase them down and wear down their charge. Some stryofoam bits have the same charge as your hand and would be repelled, other bits would have an opposite charge and would be attracted.

The vicinity of the probe's moving parts to the soil surface may actually cause some particles to move through static reaction.
Hort, I think you were talking about something like this before too.

It's amazing how little we understand about how static forces in the dry Martian desert where temperature, humidity, static, etc. vary dramatically in (yet to be discovered)zoned areas ranging from the immediate subsurface to a few feet above the martian surface.

Regarding reply 442:
The lower right image and other images that I have seen that seem to have things growing in them are fantastic! It looks like it could be either biological or non-biological.

Biological structures like plant roots, fungi, etc. branch in linear and/or radial branches.

But so do many salts/minerals.

There are kits/projects where you can grow "crystal gardens" with salts that look similar in structure to some of the Mars images.
Google (image) search: grow crystal garden

You will see structures like this:

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