NASA’s Carruthers Observatory, designed to study Earth's geocorona, reaches targeted 'halo orbit'
NASA announced that its Carruthers Geocorona Observatory has reached its intended "halo orbit," putting the spacecraft in a position to record the first repeated observations of the geocorona. The accomplishment was verified after its third and last orbital movement, a two-minute thruster fire on January 8. The spacecraft is around the Sun-Earth L1 Lagrange point, which is about a million miles away from Earth and represents a position of gravitational equilibrium.
The spacecraft took off from Kennedy Space Center aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on September 24, 2025. Ever since launch, the instruments onboard the loveseat-sized spacecraft have undergone repeated testing. The observatory, in fact, took its "first light" pictures on November 17, 2025, thereby confirming that both its Wide Field Imager and Narrow Field Imager were functioning as intended. Two of these images were taken using the Lyman-alpha wavelength, which is the light emitted by atomic hydrogen. It is the faint glow from this atomic hydrogen that is referred to as the geocorona, which is Latin for "Earth Crown. Carruthers will now attempt to complete its final checkout procedures before March, when it will begin its primary science mission, the importance of which cannot be overstated. Capturing the geocorona in detail will be a crucial step forward in forecasting near-Earth space conditions. This, in turn, will help in the protection of the Artemis astronauts, who will travel through the region to the Moon and back.
Moreover, Carruthers will also be responsible for monitoring the escape of hydrogen, one of the elements found in water, through Earth's exosphere in an attempt to understand why, unlike other planets, Earth is able to retain its water. “We’ve never had a mission before that was dedicated to making exospheric observations,” said Alex Glocer, the Carruthers mission scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “It’s really exciting that we’re going to get these measurements for the first time.” Studying the geocorona of Earth, the only known planet to support life, can help us figure out what to look for as we keep scanning the universe for fellow living beings. The mission was named for Dr. George R. Carruthers, who invented the ultraviolet camera that the Apollo 16 crew used to take the first pictures of Earth's geocorona in 1972.
Dr. Lara Waldrop of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is in charge of the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory mission. Together with Utah State University's Space Dynamics Laboratory, the University of California, Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory oversees mission implementation and operations, payload design, and development. BAE Systems designed and constructed the Carruthers spacecraft. The mission for NASA's Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington is overseen by the Explorers and Heliophysics Projects Division at the organization's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
More on Starlust
NASA one step closer to launching Artemis II—the first manned lunar mission in over 50 years
