Documents / Official release
This NASA file of astronaut scientific debriefing papers from 1962 collects internal Office of Space Sciences material on the science observations made on early Mercury flights. A February 1962 memo from Maurice Dubin asks for more detail on John Glenn's report of luminous particles and the atmospheric horizon layer. A draft memo concludes that the particles were tied to the spacecraft and were not extraterrestrial. The file also holds a Los Alamos letter that attributes the high haze layer to nitrogen peroxide, and notes on Carpenter's airglow observations.
From the source:Release of 2026-06-12 This file contains memoranda, correspondence, reports, and other materials relating to contemporary scientific interest in investigating the nature of luminous phenomena reported by astronauts John Glenn and Walter Schirra during spaceflight. This collection includes transcripts from NASA interviews and debriefings with both astronauts regarding those observations. It also contains details relating to scientific observations of atmospheric phenomena, including brief descriptions of luminous particles, experiences while aboard spacecraft, and circa 1955 theoretical analysis of meteoric particles entering the atmosphere. Pages 34-35, 55-56, 57-63, 64-113, and 122-127 feature content relevant to the PURSUE initiative.
“Tibet”2 pages
I , ,cientific Debriefing -44- 1 ' :!- ~ . ''.:, J j he Ear,t coast. But there was a quite a bit of clouds up north, broken clouds. "'·t: faul Low.man: Were there any up.usu.al terrain features? ti' -gooper: - - - - -~ k. O'Keefe: .Did you see anything that looked like a crater? ! I Cooper: No. I sure didn't. I was looking for it too. Paul Lowman: You· went over one in Ghana, but I don't know if it ·was good or not. Cooper: Over Africa there was unasua.l rocky terrain up in the Atlas mountains. I didn' t see any craters. Dr. Voas : Do you--could you see clouds and shore lines at night with no moon? Cooper: Fairly well. If there was no moon you could see them faintly. Dr. Voas : Any other terrain features that you could see? At night with no ~oon? Cooper: •No . Not much. You could see the moonlight on the water. Dr. O'Keefe: You mentioned these small particles. Do I understand correctly I that they seemed to, be pushed outward from the capsule? Cooper: If you consider this west and this east 8.lad the spacecraft is going east, regardless of spacecraft attitude, if any time I fired one of the thrusters at night, I could see glow from almost every one of the thrusters. The pitch-down thruste r I could see and the yaw I could see sh(?rtly after they got out of the nozzle. You get tremendous streams of luminous particles of fireflies, and regardless of what attitude you were in, ther appeared to come out from the spacecraft. A grea1; many could be seen for some period imd they seemed to go back along flight path. •Dr. Vo~s : Did they, actually appear to flow around? Would you say now that they were parallel ~ ~s they go back, they will appear ·optically to come together. But did they act ually curve around as if there was a flow field. Cooper: I felt they were actually moving around. Their relative movement was ... ,. I I I :t Ir 'l 't \ l\ ':\-, ~ · t
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Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 216 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.