In a hangar outside Zurich, a veteran of low Earth orbit lay under a kind of medical scanner no spacecraft was ever designed for. The patient was the European Retrievable Carrier mission, or EURECA, a 16.-4-foot-long (5 meters) European satellite that flew on the space shuttle Atlantis in early 1992 and, unusually for a satellite, actually came home. Instead of engineers with wrenches, its exam team of researchers aimed something far more penetrating than a flashlight at its aluminum skin.

What is it?

Using a high-energy X-ray system, they turned the satellite effectively transparent, revealing fuel and gas tanks, hidden residues of cleaning solutions, and the modular skeleton that once held 15 scientific instruments steady in orbit. It’s the kind of "full-body scan" that, until now, has

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