Opportunity carried on undaunted, ready to dig into her work over the American Thanksgiving holiday, while her colleagues were dining on turkey or tofurkey and marshmallow topped yams. But sometimes, it would appear, rovers need a break too.

The robot field geologist was slated to brush the dust off Sandcherry during the holiday weekend, but as she began to slowly move her instrument deployment device (IDD) or "arm," one of the shoulder joints cause a stall that stopped that plan.

When the MER team members returned to work after the holiday, they looked at the telemetry and went to work to figure out what happened. It turned out to be a glitch the engineers had seen before, a matter basically of movement logistics with the IDD during the attempt to place the rock abrasion tool (RAT) on Sandcherry. "We did a diagnostic and everything seems fine," said Callas, noting that the rover completed the Sandcherry brushing Tuesday, November 27th, as commanded. "So far, the IDD looks in good order, but things like this are always a concern," he said.

All's well that ends well, as the adage goes, and for MER November 2012 ended well. In preparation for its subsequent grind into Sandcherry, Opportunity had taken some pictures of the RAT's grind bit. "It's still looking great," reported Gale Paulsen, a systems engineer at Honeybee Robotics, the company that manufactured the RAT. Then Thursday evening, November 29th, shortly after the images of the rover's grind into Sandcherry streamed down to Earth down, he added: "The grind looks good!"

And so the MER mission is roving on, ever closer to its 9th anniversary in January 2013, with Opportunity now into her 107th month of roving Mars and doing anything but slowing down. In fact, despite all the years of roving, this robot field geologist is keeping her team on Earth as busy as ever.

In coming sols, Opportunity will be checking out other chosen targets on Matijevic Hill to try and understand more about Mars' ancient past. "We have a lot more to do," said Arvidson. "We're only right in the middle of this whole process."

From finding out what created the mystery spherules or "newberries," as Squyres initially referred to them - which the rover discovered in its first Matijevic Hill target, the Kirkwood outcrop - to finding the smectite, the rover and the MER scientists have a full agenda before them and every intention of delivering more textbook science in the months to come.

Opportunity from Meridiani Planum

As November dawned at Meridiani Planum, Opportunity was continuing her geologic survey around Matijevic Hill.

The rover spent much of the first week of the month driving, with a series of short jaunts to the south-southeast on Sols 3119, 3121, and to the south on 3124 (November 1, 3, and 6, 2012), putting 38 meters (125 feet), 25 meters (82 feet), and 30 meters (98 feet) respectively on her odometer. Just like she's done throughout the survey, Opportunity took a number of pictures with her Pancam before each drive, and then following the drives, she took a 360-degree panorama with her navigation camera (Navcam).