Rao Achutuni obtained a doctoral degree in Meteorology from the University of Oklahoma in 1978. Throughout his thirty-year career, he worked at the University of Missouri-Columbia and federal agencies such as NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) and USDA’s Foreign Agriculture Service (FAS). His research and technical expertise covered a wide range of fields, including the use of polar-orbiting environmental satellites to ensure global food security, monitoring of large-scale droughts and floods, assessing the agricultural impacts of global warming, and utilizing NOAA’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES). While at USDA/FAS, he served as a Commodity Analyst for South America and the eastern United States; and administered numerous scientific exchange programs on behalf of USDA/FAS.
Rao also visited numerous countries in Africa, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and Central and South America, where he established various scientific and technology transfer programs at the national level.
Since retiring about fifteen years ago, Rao has published newsletters on commercial agricultural crops such as Oil Palm, Cocoa, and Coffee. However, his passion lies in lunar and space exploration, which is evident in his latest work, Mystic Moon: A Lunar Odyssey.