Not Hubble or Webb, but Carruthers. What appears to have been the first telescope operated in space to examine the composition of interstellar space was created by George R. Carruthers, patented in 1969 and set up and used on the first Moon-based laboratory by astronaut John Young in 1972. Dr. Carruthers died the day after Christmas 2020 in Washington, D.C. at 81; he had been among the few African-American astrophysicists working at NASA in the 1960s.
Dr. Carruthers was the principal investigator, with Dr. Thornton Page working with him, who developed an “Image Converter for Detecting Electromagnetic Radiation Especially in Short Wave Lengths.” His obituary published Jan. 3 in the Washington Post describes it as “a specialized ultraviolet telescope … that could observe radiation and other properties in space,” amplifying its images through electronically controlled lenses, prism and mirror, and converting photons to electrons to record them on film. With a 1970 version of it, launched on an unmanned rocket, the presence of hydrogen molecules throughout “empty” space was determined for the first time. The Carruthers telescope on Apollo 16 was also trained on the Earth’s atmosphere from the Moon. “It was spectacularly successful, imaging the Earth’s outermost atmosphere in its entirety in the far ultraviolet range of the spectrum,” said the National Air and Space Museum’s astronomy historian David DeVorkin. “It also surveyed myriad clouds of gas, stars and galaxies in deep space.”
The use of this telescope essentially began the deep-space study of star formation, with hundreds of precise images of stars and galaxies – as well as the images of Earth’s atmosphere – taken on that Apollo 16 mission alone.
