An example of simile in popular science writing:
"When the results came in, at first the mission scientists thought that the Rosetta instruments had failed to analyse the asteroid [Luteria] at all, being too distant to 'sniff' its gases. Instead, they thought they had simply sniffed the spacecraft itself, or rather its exhaust gases. … after careful examination of the data the scientists saw that Rosetta had picked up the scent of the asteroid after all."
Natalie Starkey
Starkey, N. (2018). Catching Stardust. Comets, asteroids and the birth of the solar system. Bloomsbury Sigma.
There is an example here of a diminished simile: 'sniff' is marked by so-called scare quotes (inverted commas), but in the following sentence the word sniffed is not marked, but used as a metaphor.
Read about examples of science similes
