Piles of sand on Mars have been very hazardous to rovers. The region called Sita was appropriately named with the Navajo word for amongst the sand. It's a sand trap that perseverance has literally gone out of its way to avoid. During the descent, the landing system steered clear of this region as it was programmed to do because of all the sand dunes it contains. Perseverance landed in a zone just outside of Sita where there are very few dunes, but now it has to drive around Sita to get to the Delta. As we'll see, the Ingenuity helicopter just showed that it can fly right over it. But why so much concern about sand? Most recently, the Curiosity rover in Gail Crater tried to take a shortcut through a place called Hidden Valley. The sand dunes looked traversable, but instead they almost trapped the rover. The transition from hard-packed ground to loose even slippery sand is evident here. Curiosity struggled to make progress through this material. You can see how it piles up in front of the wheels, almost like snow in front of a plow. So, the decision was made to skip the shortcut and back out of the valley. The opportunity rover in Murtyani, Plannum, encountered a landscape covered in low-sand ripples that it could easily drive over until one saw it couldn't. It drove into a ripple that was just high enough to nearly bury the wheels. It became known as purgatory dunes. Weeks of effort were spent in a test bed at the Jet Propulsion Lab to figure out the best way to get a Martian rover unstuck. Turns out that straightening the wheels and just letting them spin does the job. But it took many saws of repeated effort to drive out. This escape allowed opportunity to live another day, or 4,624, to be exact. The spirit rover in Gusev Crater had a bad saw when it broke through a thin crust over fine sulfur-rich soil. It was already hobbled by a dead right front wheel that had forced it to drive backwards, dragging it along behind. A combination of wheel spinning and turning was starting to work, but the winter season had arrived and the low sun angle and solar panels tilted away from it didn't generate enough power to keep up the effort. It didn't survive the Martian winter and now remains permanently stuck in its sand trap. Earlier this week, the ingenuity helicopter completed its ninth and most ambitious flight yet. It took off from this location, rising to a height of 10 meters and flying southwest for two minutes and 46 seconds, covering about 625 meters, more than twice its previous record. It captured this flight with its downward-looking black and white camera taking images about once per second. Its forward-looking color camera images are interspersed throughout the flight. Here I include a context image from the orbital high-rise camera showing the flight path and an approximate view of the color camera scene. The first one includes the looping tracks of perseverance trying out its autonab capability. The downward-looking view catches these tracks as well. The moment ingenuity crossed into CETA, it tilted forward enough to view its entire flight path. As it entered the lower terrain, it adjusted its altitude downward. This view helps to show just how sandy CETA really is. This view captures the transition into the larger and straighter sand dunes. When ingenuity reached the halfway point, it caught some nice examples of the rocks in CETA. It looks like there are both the flat, pavor-like outcrops and the more angular and darker cobbles and boulders. The largest dunes are in this scene as ingenuity reaches the other side. The dunes disappear right at the transition out of CETA. The large outcrops of rock appear again at the margin. This view shows the return of smooth terrain which provides a safe landing zone for ingenuity. The lower edge of this scene is where it landed. And it also shows a roughly parallel set of rocks that represent one of the large fractures that are common in Jezero. This will be explored by perseverance once it catches up to the Hazard Hopping helicopter.