Meet Dr. Lara Waldrop! She is a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the Principal Investigator of NASA’s Carruthers Geocorona Observatory. She always loved science, but her passion for space began with stargazing as a high school student  in Japan.  

Dr. Waldrop earned her Ph.D. in Astronomy and Space Physics at Boston University. She became fascinated with how the Sun and Earth interact, especially through space weather and the upper atmosphere. Her research has led to surprising discoveries, like finding hot hydrogen atoms much lower in the atmosphere than scientists expected, which has changed how we think about the edge of space.

Fun fact: Dr. Waldrop didn’t just study space from the ground—her team works with satellites and spacecraft to get their data, and she loves solving puzzles about the invisible parts of Earth’s atmosphere. She has also won big honors, including the NSF CAREER Award and the Y.T. Lo Fellowship, which recognize her creativity and leadership as a scientist.

Another fun detail is that while her job sounds like pure rocket science, she also spends a lot of time teaching and mentoring students, encouraging them to ask big questions about the universe. She often reminds people that space science isn’t just about astronauts and rockets—it’s also about careful detective work, creative problem-solving, and a love of discovery.

Today she is leading NASA’s Carruthers mission — a groundbreaking space science mission to study Earth’s exosphere — the outermost layer of Earth’s atmosphere.  She is the first NASA mission PI to be from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The mission is named after the universities’ famous alumni, Dr. George R. Carruthers, who pioneered the world’s first images of the geocorona from a camera on the moon! The geocorona is the UV glow emitted by the exosphere. The Carruthers Geocorona Observatory spacecraft will take continuous images of the geocornoa from deep in space of it for years to help scientists learn more about the way the exosphere works.