Reminds me of a story about a probe i saw a while back (sorry, I have no idea which one) which took photos of the body it was orbiting around, and then to get an accurate surface map, the engineers projected the images back onto a sphere of the same apparent size as the body, and could then take photos all around it, because the photo distortion was cancelled out by the projection distortion and looking down at the surface gave an accurate view

They have such a good design for this website and all of it is wasted with the share buttons on the top.