Carruthers Geocorona Observatory

The Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, previously called Global Lyman-alpha Imagers of the Dynamic Exosphere, is a NASA mission led by the University of Illinois, which will survey ultraviolet light emitted by Earth's outermost atmospheric layer, the exosphere, and geocorona.

Name

The mission name was given to honour George R. Carruthers, a pioneer American space physicist, engineer, and inventor. He is widely recognised for his groundbreaking contributions to ultraviolet astronomy. His most famous invention was the Far Ultraviolet Camera/Spectrograph, a compact but powerful telescope that was placed by the astronauts of Apollo 16 on the Moon in 1972.

Launch

Carruthers Geocorona Observatory was launched as a secondary payload on the SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicle carrying NASA's Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe spacecraft, together with NOAA's SWFO-L1, on 24 September 2025.