Students buzzing with excitement entered the University of Illinois Campus Instructional Facility in the early morning hours of September 24, 2025. Clutching their cell phones and coffee cups, they squeezed together on the Monumental Steps, a fitting setting to witness the 6:30 a.m. historic launch of the first Illinois-led NASA spacecraft mission. Watching a live feed from NASA, students joined the countdown … 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 … and cheered at the announcement, “Engines full power and lift off.” 

“Go Falcon, go IMAP, go SWIFO-L1 and go Carruthers,” continued the NASA announcer, naming the missions onboard. “And we are flying three new missions on a million-miles journey to track space weather.”

Later in the day, students gathered in person and online to hear from Electrical and Computer Engineering Associate Professor and Y.T. Lo Fellow Lara Waldrop, the principal investigator of the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory mission, about the launch and what comes next.

Jonathan Makela, associate dean for undergraduate programs and Abel Bliss  Professor  of Engineering led the conversation.

Congratulations to you and your entire team on a successful launch. Could you share from your perspective how the launch went and give us some insight into what it was like to be on site during the launch?

It was beyond thrilling! It's been a whirlwind of a day. We woke up at four in the morning trying to beat the traffic, beat the lines into the Kennedy Space Center and head out to our viewing platform. We were on a balcony just a few miles away from the launch site. It's one of the closest launch pads to that particular vantage. What that means is when the rocket lifted off, not only could you see it, you could feel it in your bones. It was an incredible experience … Not only the physical experience of watching a rocket lift off but knowing that the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory was on board and seeing it fly off into space.

That's fantastic. I've been at a rocket launch before and you're right, the feel of all the air rushing by and the noise and just that bone-rattling chill — there's really no other experience like it. 

Absolutely. You know, it's a little bit like eclipses. Once you've seen one, you become an eclipse hunter. I'm going to be a launch hunter.

Photo Credit: Andy Olson, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

 

What are the most significant discoveries or surprises you hope to gain from the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, and how could they impact our understanding of Earth's atmosphere and space weather?

Well, there's a lot that we don't know about Earth's exosphere. For one thing, it's just so big and so far away that for the past several decades, very few measurements have been made. So, we expect to be making a lot of discoveries. We're going to discover just how big it is. We're going to discover just how many hydrogen atoms populate its regions, how they're distributed spatially and how they change over time. All of these are going to be discoveries.

When it comes to space weather, this region is really vital. It plays a crucial role in how Earth recovers from geomagnetic storms. In short, the more hydrogen atoms there are, the faster the recovery. So, we expect to be able to use our data from this spacecraft to improve our predictions of recovery time scales and better protect those assets in space.

Is it possible there's something new that we hadn't thought we were going to be able to capture with our measurements that this great observatory will allow us to see for the first time?

We will certainly have our eyes open for anything like that. You know, one of the benefits of having our scientific instrument, these ultraviolet cameras on their own spacecraft platform that we have full control over, is unlike any other experiment for Earth's exosphere that NASA's ever done … we can point anywhere we want. So, if we see something interesting, we just change our science operations plan and start something new and check it out further. It’s very exciting to be so much in control over mission operations. 

It’s been a long journey. It's been several years since you proposed and were accepted and worked through the phases to get to this point. Can you tell us about the most memorable part of that journey from proposal now to launch? 

You know, it's all memorable. It's been such a marathon, and every phase had its own unique flavor. The very beginning when we first got selected, defining the requirements, and then after design you implement it, and after you implement it, you test it. And test it again and again in our case. Each one of those phases has been so unique and so intense and involved. It is really hard to name any one aspect of this process except to say that it's all been a pleasure. 

I like that tie in to setting the design requirements and things like that. A lot of our students who are seniors now are going through their capstone design courses, and that's a part of the exercise. This is just an example of how that engineering design process is actually used in the real world.

“Every day that I've been coming to Kennedy [Space Center] over this past week, I've been passing this big movie of President Kennedy saying, "We don't do these things because they're easy. We do them because they're hard." He was talking about going to the moon. That's exactly how I feel about the Carruthers mission. It was hard. That's why we did it. And what a tremendous benefit we're reaping today.”

Lara Waldrop, Principal Investigator

 

What was the hardest part of actually designing this piece of high-precision machinery that has to be able to survive the heavy Q associated with the launch and then operate in an environment where you can't just make a service call if something goes wrong?

There are numerous small technical aspects of the mission implementation that I could name, but the thing that strikes me the most is the systems engineering aspect of it. The fact that we had to coordinate so well — thermal coordinates with power which coordinates with our payload. For just a small example, we have to keep our payload in shadow just to keep its temperature stable because if its temperature starts to drift, now the sensitivity of our instrument to the wavelength that we're targeting, this ultraviolet light, starts to drift. And so now our sensitivity calibration can change. So, all of these little details had to work together. And there were dozens of teams that coordinated so well. The systems engineering aspect of it is really what has impressed me the most with accomplishing something that is so unbelievably technically challenging. 

You talked about getting to the Kennedy Space Center today. Were you actually in the mission control room during the launch, and to what extent are you going to continue to be involved in those mission-level control operations?

I wasn't in the mission control room today. I chose to view the launch from the platform so that I could be there with my 10-year-old son. You mentioned that I've been working on this mission for a few years. The seed was planted in my mind to start thinking about this instrument and the mission when I heard through the grapevine, so to speak, that NASA was thinking about sending a rocket out to L1. I knew this is the perfect vantage for exospheric science, and I had to be on that rocket. 

When I got that phone call that NASA's going to be releasing a solicitation — I remember the phone call — my son was an infant in the carrier on my chest. I was on maternity leave typing on my standup desk, essentially at home. He's 10 now. It was really important to me to be able to watch the launch with him. 

Our team works so well. I had full confidence in our project manager to handle things in the mission control room on my behalf during liftoff. After liftoff when we were essentially in communication through the deep space network ground link for the first few hours in order to establish communication, to make sure we can uplink commands to the spacecraft, I was paying a bit closer attention. But for that moment of liftoff, I wanted to be with my family. 

That's awesome! You mentioned L1 and that it's a rare opportunity to be able to get a ride out there. This launch had several different satellites on it, right? I think I heard it described as a cosmic carpool of sorts. Is there going to be any relationship between the Carruthers Observatory and these other missions or was that just happenstance that you're all on the same rocket launch today?

Well, not exactly happenstance. We certainly didn't coordinate in advance in any concrete way. But launches to this vantage in space, a million miles away, are very rare. This vantage is so well suited for space weather investigation, both operational, which is what NOA’s SWIFO-L1 satellite will be doing — acquiring real-time data that can flow back to Earth and give up-to-the-minute information about the space weather environment that's on its way minutes in advance — as well as the flagship IMAP mission that has insitu and remote detectors sitting there upstream of the solar wind away from Earth toward the sun essentially as it's flowing past the spacecraft. Again, it's the perfect place to investigate space weather. So, it's not exactly a coincidence that all three missions have that as science goals.

So, you've launched. There are now a couple months for the satellite to make its way to L1. It's a million miles away, so it's going to take some time. How does your role change as you transition from designing, building and launch to checkout, operations and eventually scientific discovery? 

Our first job is to make sure we are able to communicate to the spacecraft and tell it what we want it to do. That's very much Illinois' responsibility of setting the operations plan. So, we tell it which stars to point to for calibration. Numerous calibration operations will happen during cruise phase — things like, which of our six optical filters do we want to use — or six positions in our filter wheel do we want to use — for that particular observation? How long do we want to stare? Where are we pointing? Things of that nature Illinois is planning.

The mission’s operations center at Berkeley has a lot of experience running missions. In fact, at the moment, they're running more than one. They'll be communicating our commands to the spacecraft and then sending us the data once it comes down. And the moment we get the data, we push it through what we call the science analysis pipeline. This is a gigantic amount of code that was developed also by University of Illinois. That’s where we start making those discoveries and really being able to see the science behind the data.

Looking at the bigger picture, what initially inspired you to focus on the geocorona, and what do you hope the next generation of scientists will build on from your work? 

I really got started as an undergraduate. I joined a professor's research group where he was doing exospheric science from the ground with visible emission. Now, this is a much harder measurement to make. It's much dimmer than the ultraviolet light that the exosphere gives off. But it's also much harder to interpret, and this was the primary way that scientists at that point investigated the exosphere. What it meant was that if you went, back then, to the Wikipedia page on exosphere, it was about a paragraph long. There was a lot to learn. 

Once I began my career, I realized this is not just low-hanging fruit in terms of making discoveries, but this exosphere plays such an important role in space weather. This is a major knowledge gap that's affecting our space assets. At that point I tried to get my hands on every piece of exospheric data that had ever been acquired, and I realized we're missing a really big piece by not having wide field images from a dist advantage. That is the ideal way to do it, and that was what I set my mind to doing. 

This mission is named after Dr. George Carruthers, a three-time Illinois alumnus. How has his work and legacy inspired you?

Photo Credit: University of Illinois Archives, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library.

His legacy and his impact on exospheric science was so clear that the very first sentence of the proposal that we submitted to NASA mentioned his work. It said, “It's been more than 50 years since Dr. George Carruthers took the first picture of the exosphere, and since then only three more have ever been acquired.” Right away his legacy, the fact that he invented the camera that could take photographs with ultraviolet light, has obviously influenced our decision to pursue an instrument with that similar capability. 

From what I also understand is that George Carruthers himself was a scientist educator, which is something that I also personally aspire to be. There's a reason I'm at a university and not at a lab where a lot of NASA missions are managed and led. Doing it from a university where I can get students involved was something that Dr. Carruthers himself valued. I'm thrilled to be able to carry his legacy forward, especially at the University of Illinois where he got his start.

And you've had a chance to connect with his family, right? There's still that connection between the university, the mission and the family?

That's absolutely true. They came to the renaming ceremony. The original name of our mission was GLIDE (global lime and alpha imager of the dynamic exosphere). I came up with that acronym myself. I'm still very proud of it. 

When Dr. Nicola Fox at NASA had this idea in 2022 to rename the mission after him [Carruthers], we did it right. We had a ceremony at the Beckman Institute, invited his family and made it a real tribute to Dr. Carruthers’ legacy. 

That's great. I think any good NASA mission has to have great science, but also a great acronym, so, kudos on that! Finally, you mentioned the advantage of being at a university and being able to involve students in the research and being that scientist educator that we all strive to be and you're a fantastic example of. Many of our students are wondering, how can they get involved either in this project or in future NASA missions? 

I think one of the nice things about NASA is they have such a strong educational component to their federal mission. One thing students could consider, that's not

just relevant to this mission, is getting signed up for one of the numerous summer schools that NASA has. They accept undergraduates, graduate students, even early career postdocs. NASA has a lot of educational opportunities, internship programs and that kind of thing that will get students hands-on experience with any of the NASA missions that are currently in operation as well as some of the historical data analysis and also missions in planning. 

In my case the students that are working with me essentially found me to some extent. Almost all of them were recruited from the courses that I teach, and I'm really looking forward to teaching another course in the spring and hopefully meeting some new students that can get involved.

Engineering Affiliations

Lara Waldrop is an Illinois Grainger Engineering electrical and computer engineering associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. She holds a Y.T. Lo Fellow appointment.

Jonathan Makela is the associate dean of undergraduate programs at Illinois Grainger Engineering. He is an Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.