This Planetary Society update is a must read for any MER enthusiast!

Oppy gets more headlines, but get this:

...while Spirit slept in most of the year, it did manage to grab the spotlight in 2010 with what has turned out to be "the biggest science news of the year," as Squyres put it during an interview earlier this week.

A team of scientists led by NASA's Dick Morris discovered magnesium iron carbonate in data from a rock that the rover had taken back in December 2005, at the foot of Husband Hill. The discovery was not only a sign of past water, the rovers' key science objective, but it was near neutral water, more like the "fresh" water on Earth, water more conducive for the origin of life than any other pools or trickles of past water either rover had found. Planetary scientists had been looking to find carbonates on Mars for decades. Spirit sent home 'the gold.'

So much data from this mission, this is just being discovered now five years later!

Oppy news:

The Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) – which is onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and on which Arvidson serves as a co-investigator – detected the signature for a large patch of hydrated minerals along part of Santa Maria's southeast rim, something not seen before along Opportunity's path.

Plans call for Opportunity stay at Santa Maria through the coming solar conjunction, a two-week period where the Sun is between Earth and Mars and communications between the two planets is difficult to impossible. It begins in mid-to-late January 2011 and extends into early February, so the rovers will in effect "stand down," with Opportunity likely taking long overnight measurements of target compositions. “We're going to spend solar conjunction at a good spot on the rim,” said Squyres.

After solar conjunction, Opportunity will head on to Endeavour. “The most important thing between Santa Maria and Endeavour that we know about is – getting to Endeavour," said Squyres. "We're going to put the pedal down and go like hell."

MUCH more info in the article.

Another great article from Universe Today.

MERs as seen from MRO: