While Curiosity’s off drilling into the surface of Mars, plenty of other man-made, space-bound machines are surveying the rest of the solar system, and coming with some pretty cool stuff. NASA’s MESSENGER, for instance, put together quite the mesmerising footage of Mercury’s spin.
Stitched together out of over 1000 shots, the little movie shows roughly what Mercury looks like as it careens around the sun in its tight orbit. The rainbow of colours are — of course — simulated, and correlate with the spectral reflectance of the planet’s surface. This information is doubtlessly relevant to some scientists out there, but for the rest of us it’s just fun to watch. And that’s worth something in its own right. [Space.com]