A New Eye on Earth's Edge: UC Berkeley-Guided Space Telescope Has Liftoff

This week, a rocket lifted off from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center carrying a new space telescope to its parking spot about 1 million miles from Earth, guided by mission operators at the Space Sciences Laboratory at UC Berkeley.

Once it reaches its permanent home, the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory will turn its eyes back to Earth to study the exosphere — the outermost layer of our atmosphere, where satellites orbit. Researchers hope that by better understanding how this region interacts with space weather from the Sun, they’ll be able to improve protections for satellites, which can be knocked offline by solar activity.

The telescope got a ride into space along with equipment for two other missions, each designed to study a different aspect of the Sun’s influence on our solar system.

During a visit to the Berkeley lab’s mission control room on Thursday, everything appeared calm and smooth as operators and technicians worked to bring the Carruthers systems online in a process known as “commissioning” the spacecraft.

On large display screens, boxes of colors, text and graphs indicated the status of systems on the spacecraft with lots of green. That means all is well, said Abhi Tripathi, director of mission operations.

“All the displays have been designed to get your attention the moment something is off,” he said of the graphical user interfaces, or GUIs (pronounced “gooeys”). “If something flashes red, we have to quickly diagnose what is the issue and then figure out what we want to do to get it back within limits.”

Operators were in the middle of a “pass,” a window of time during which NASA’s Deep Space Network allows for communication with the spacecraft. Mission operators send commands and receive data, images and navigation updates with the global network. On average, they get about two passes per day.

Earlier that day, Tripathi said, the room buzzed with activity when the spacecraft communicated in a slightly unexpected way. Fortunately, the team quickly resolved the issue.

Of course, the biggest excitement of the week was the launch early Wednesday.

“The entire team in here came as early as 1:30 in the morning to watch the 4:30 a.m. launch,” Tripathi said. “The energy was high. I don’t think anyone had coffee. Everyone was working off of adrenaline.”

About an hour and a half after the launch, the spacecraft cleanly separated from the rocket.

“And we gave a big round of applause, of course,” he said.

About 30 minutes later, the team achieved what they call first contact — a nerve-wracking moment in any mission when they establish communication.

“Will the spacecraft respond? Is it still alive?” Tripathi said. “And it was. So we all finally exhaled. After that, we got down to business.”

Operating a mission like Carruthers is a source of pride for the Berkeley lab, which has been home to four Nobel Prize winners.

“There are maybe two universities in the country that can run a mission like this,” said Lindy Elkins-Tanton, newly installed director of the lab.

“Our big strength over time has been space weather. What does the sun do to space?” she said. “What kind of radiation does it put out? How does it affect our Earth’s atmosphere? How does it interact with the magnetic field? Things that surprisingly we don’t understand even though they affect us every single day.”

The Carruthers mission will continue the lab’s legacy in space weather research, but with a focus on a part of Earth’s atmosphere we haven’t seen clearly since Apollo 16. That mission, the fifth and one of the last to land on the Moon, carried a camera designed by NASA scientist George Carruthers.

The camera, capable of capturing ultraviolet light, was placed in the shadow of the lunar module to block scattered light. From there, astronauts pointed it back toward Earth and captured the first — and so far only — images of the geocorona: a faint glow around Earth caused by the outermost reaches of the atmosphere.

“That imager was remarkable; it worked amazingly well,” said Thomas Immel, project scientist for the Carruthers observatory mission. “But it was just a snapshot.”

This new mission will be able to capture what is going on, in incredible detail, over time.

The upper atmosphere is composed mostly of hydrogen and helium. These gases help shield Earth from solar storms, but scientists aren’t sure if they’re gradually being stripped away by the solar wind. It’s also unclear how this region interacts with ions and particles from the Sun.

In 2022, for instance, a solar storm destroyed about 40 SpaceX satellites in orbit.

To prevent such losses in the future, scientists need a clearer picture of this barely understood region of space.

“And that’s exactly what we’re going to be looking at,” Elkins-Tanton said. “It’s really a blank spot in human knowledge.”

The Carruthers team hopes to unveil the mission’s first images at the American Geophysical Union conference this winter in New Orleans.