May 17 (UPI) -- NASA's smallest exoplanet-hunting satellite, the CubeSat ASTERIA, recently captured photographs of Los Angeles from 250 miles above Earth's surface. The space agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory published the photographs on its website this week.
ASTERIA, short for Arcsecond Space Telescope Enabling Research in Astrophysics, is a miniaturized satellite made up of six cubed units measuring 4.5 inches on each size. Most of the time, ASTERIA is pointed away from Earth, searching for alien worlds in the Milky Way, far beyond our own solar system. But in March, the CubeSat trained its camera on the City of Angels.