a large building in the background: The IMAGE spacecraft undergoing launch preparations in early 2000. (NASA) IMAGE was a machine designed to “see the invisible,” as one of the mission's lead scientists once put it.
It was a squat and boxy thing, like many satellites, with a long technical name — Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration — that obscured its plain and noble purpose: to map the roiling sphere of electric gas around the Earth that protects us from