Heat Shield Flank Close Up

This image from NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity features an up-close view of the flank piece of the rover's broken heat shield.

The rover spent 36 sols investigating how the severe heating during entry through the atmosphere affected the heat shield. The most obvious is the fact that the heat shield inverted upon impact. Overall, engineers were interested in evaluating the performance of the heat shield's thermal protection system.

This is the panormamic camera team's best current attempt at generating a "true color" view of what this scene would look like if viewed by a human on Mars. It was generated from a mathematical combination of six calibrated, left-eye panoramic camera images acquired around 3:07 p.m. local solar time on Opportunity's sol 331 (Dec. 28, 2004) using filters ranging in wavelengths from 430 to 750 nanometers.