Dr. George Carruthers, right, and William Conway, a project manager at the Naval Research Institute, examine the gold-plated ultraviolet camera/spectrograph, the first moon-based observatory that Carruthers developed for the Apollo 16 mission. Working for the Naval Research Laboratory, Carruthers had three years earlier received a patent for a Far Ultraviolet Electrographic Camera, which obtained images in electromagnetic radiation in short wavelengths.
Apollo 16 astronauts placed the observatory on the moon in April 1972, where it sits today on the moon’s Descartes highland region, in the shadow of the lunar module Orion. Asked to explain highlights of the instrument's findings for a general audience, Dr. Carruthers said "the most immediately obvious and spectacular results were really for the Earth observations, because this was the first time that the Earth had been photographed from a distance in ultraviolet light, so that you could see the full extent of the hydrogen atmosphere, the polar auroris and what we call the tropical airglow belt."
Dr. Carruthers made the first detection of molecular hydrogen in space, in 1970, using a sounding rocket. He developed a rocket instrument that obtained an ultraviolet image of Comet Halley, and an instrument with two cameras, with different far-UV wavelength sensitivities, used on the STS-39 space shuttle mission in 1991. He has worked on UV imaging of Earth’s polar auroras and of the faint photochemical luminescence found in the upper atmosphere, with an instrument, Global Imaging Monitor of the Ionosphere (GIMI), on a Department of Defense satellite, the Advanced Research and Global Observation Satellite (ARGOS), launched in 1999. In 2012, he was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the nation's highest honor for technology achievement.
Image Credit: U.S. Naval Research Laboratory
Last Updated: Feb. 2, 2017
Editor: Sarah Loff
NASA
Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui
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