George Carruthers

George Carruthers in the middle behind his UV spectrograph for the Apollo mission. He is speaking to Apollo 16 commander John Young on the right of the picture. To his left Rocco Petrone , director of the Apollo program, and to his left the lunar module pilot Charles Duke .

George Robert Carruthers (born October 1, 1939 in Cincinnati ) is an American physicist of African American ethnicity, who was a pioneer of ultraviolet spectroscopy in astronomy and space travel in the 1960s.

Carruther's father was a civil engineer with the US Army Air Corps and encouraged his son's natural science talent, who built his first telescope when he was ten. At the age of twelve he lost his father and his mother moved with him to Chicago. Carruthers studied physics from 1957 and finally aerospace engineering and received his doctorate in 1964 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign . Before that, he received his bachelor's degree in physics there in 1961 and his master's degree in nuclear engineering in 1962. As a post-doctoral student he was at the US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington DC, where he was permanently employed in 1966 and conducted research at the NRL's EO Hurlburt Center for Space Research. He developed a UV telescope and UV spectrograph, which was used on the Apollo 16 mission on the moon in April 1972 and remained there. He examined the earth's atmosphere (observation of auroras and other phenomena in the ionosphere, while most UV radiation is absorbed from the earth's surface) and over 550 stars, nebulae and galaxies (around 200 UV photos). A second identical camera was used on the last Skylab flight in 1973 to observe Comet Kohoutek. From 1982 he headed the UV (ultraviolet radiation) department at the NRL. In the 1980s his camera was used to study Halley's Comet and in 1991 he built a camera for a space shuttle mission. He later gave courses for teachers in space science in Washington DC and taught at Howard University from 2002 .

Carruthers UV camera in the National Air and Space Museum

He received NASA's Exceptional Scientific Achievement Award, the 2011 National Medal of Technology, and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame .

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personal data
SURNAME	Carruthers, George
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Carruthers, George Robert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH	October 1, 1939
PLACE OF BIRTH	Cincinnati