Mercury: The Party Animal of the Solar System

The image doesn’t quite properly explain that the orbits are actually those of MESSENGER, the NASA spacecraft that was trying to orbit Mercury (not the orbit of Mercury itself). Don’t blame the spacecraft though – it’s Mercury’s lopsided mass and thus its unstable gravity field that has it in a wibbly wobbly orbit (probably caused by an asteroid collision). He seriously does need to take a cab…

[Via I fucking love science]


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