I'm reading about Apollo 13, and I realized that they jettisoned the command module and took a couple of grainy pictures of the blown side panels, and that's all they could do at the time. Any written account of where that piece may have floated off to? Did it burn in the atmosphere, or is it in some kind of tracked orbit one day to be recovered for a more thorough examination? Or is it just floating off into space, likely forever lost?
Burned up in the atmosphere. Those pictures were taken soon before re-entry, when both the broken service module and the "lifeboat" lunar module were jettisoned. The command module didn't have a problem, and worked fine, and that's what the three astronauts took the pictures from and used for re-entry. The reason they needed to use the lunar module as a lifeboat was because the life support and power systems in the service module were not working. Once they got close enough to earth, they switched back to the command module and had a normal re-entry.