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.
