George Carruthers, 1939-2020

As Carruthers explained in a 1999 American Institute of Physics oral history, the camera was set up on the moon and trained on the Earth with the goal of capturing images of the planet’s upper atmosphere. During the mission itself, the scientist was unable to communicate with the astronauts, but he listened in as the camera was being put to use many, many miles away. “We could actually hear them talking about our instrument,” Carruthers remembered.

Carruthers, who died on Dec. 26 at the age of 81, was among four children born to native Chicagoans George and Sophia Carruthers. Young George’s father was employed as an engineer at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, but, growing up first in Cincinnati and then in rural Milford, his initial interest in science was prompted not by a desire to imitate his father but to live out comic book adventures. “When I was about 8 or 9 years old, I got a Buck Rogers comic book from my grandmother, and that was, of course, long before there was any such thing as a space program,” Carruthers said in a 1992 oral history with the Center for History of Physics. It wasn’t long before he was dipping into one of his father’s astronomy books and constructing his first amateur telescope using a kit, “just a simple refractor, which had an objective lens and an eyepiece lens,” he said.

Upon the death of his father when he was 12, George’s mother pulled up stakes and moved the family to Chicago. There, he learned the finer points of telescope-making from classes at Adler Planetarium before entering the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he received a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering and advanced degrees in nuclear, aeronautical, and astronautical engineering. Although he estimated that he was among just 1% of black engineering students, he said in the 1999 NASA oral history, “I never saw any instances of discrimination that prevented me from doing whatever I wanted to do there.”

Carruthers was single-minded, and when he arrived at the Naval Research Laboratory, he didn’t waste much time: At the height of the space age, NASA solicited ideas for experiments to be included on subsequent Apollo missions. “I put in a proposal to use an instrument similar to our sounding rocket experiment on the moon to look back at the Earth, specifically to study the Earth’s upper atmosphere, which is difficult to study,” Carruthers told NASA in 1999 of the instrument he developed alongside a colleague, astronomy professor Thornton Page.

With American space superiority over the Russians still a priority, the project, once approved, was placed on an accelerated timetable. “We got the approval in 1970 to go ahead with it, and the launch was in April of 1972,” Carruthers said. “The advantage, though, was that money was no object in those days.”

Yet Carruthers’s contribution was lasting: While the world was abuzz at the sight of men in spacesuits hopping across the moonscape, Carruthers’s camera, encased in gold plate, enabled earthlings to look back at their home habitat as they never quite had before. “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,” he said.

The recipient of numerous honors, including, in 2011, from President Barack Obama, the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the most inspiring part of Carruthers’s story is where it began: He came of age during an era when it was possible to gaze at the stars as a boy in the Midwest and actually expect to get there. His was a charmed and trailblazing life that broke barriers and helped us to see ourselves better.

Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Humanities.