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PIA07403: Heat Shield Flank Close Up
This image taken on Dec. 28, 2004 by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity features an up-close view of the flank piece of the rover's broken heat shield laying on the red soil of martian terrain.
 Target Name:  Mars
 Is a satellite of:  Sol (our sun)
 Mission:  Mars Exploration Rover (MER) 
 Spacecraft:  Opportunity
 Instrument:  Panoramic Camera 
 Product Size:  1024 x 1024 pixels (w x h) 
 Produced By:  Cornell University 
 Full-Res TIFF:  PIA07403.tif (2.902 MB)
 Full-Res JPEG:  PIA07403.jpg (112.4 kB)  

Click on the image above to download a moderately sized image in JPEG format (possibly reduced in size from original)

Original Caption Released with Image:

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.

Image Credit:
NASA/JPL/Cornell

Image Addition Date:
2005-03-01