Imaging the Exosphere

from Google AI:

The Carruthers mission, officially the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, is a new NASA heliophysics mission launched in September 2025 to study Earth's exosphere. It is named for Dr. George R. Carruthers, who took the first ultraviolet images of the exosphere during the Apollo 16 mission. The mission's goal is to provide continuous, detailed observations of Earth's outermost atmospheric layer, the "geocorona," to understand its shape, size, density, and how it changes in response to solar wind and space weather, which can impact satellites and technology. The spacecraft operates from the Earth-Sun Lagrange point 1 (L1)