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.
J '• '• srientif ic Debriefing -48- 1 1 ··Pf. Voao: • You seemed to have the general impression that you w~re stationary .~ 8:fld everything else is moving. ~ Cpoper: That's right. You sort of become the center of everytijing, and you think t hpw you can move the earth around, 'When you want it, rather than move yourself. Dr. I Voao: Now, as you sat there with this moving picture in front of you, did you \ have the general feeling you were sitting upright or flying on your back? Cooper: I did very distinctly feel I was sitting upright. A couple of times on account of the way you fee_l in the straps like hanging upside down. Every ti.me I dropped something, I grabbed at it below. I never had trouble handling pencil. I never had any trouble putting it where I wanted or getting it. One ti.me I made a wild grab for the · camera as I thought it was going to fall, but of course it didn't. Dr. Voas: On periods af'ter you awakened, did you__ have· ·reeling you had gone to sleep sitting upright? Cooper: Yes. Definitely. Dr. Voao: You mentioned sometimes you had the feeling of being upside down. Was this correlated with the spacecraf't being inverted? Visually, I mean. I Cooper: No. I think this was purely a feeling of the straps. You're floating in the straps rather than being firm; like inverted flight in an aircraf't. Voas: Did you have ~, general feeling of being stationary? This general feeling of being stationary was not changed by any control action? Cooper: I tried to give them some pretty good rates, but bad no feel for rates at all. Cooper: Vision-wise, you would see things changing ou then pretty fast, but it wasn't bothersome at all. Dr. Voas: When you say "pretty good rates," this is 2 to 3 degrees per second? Cooper: Three, four or five degrees. ' ' . . ·. ... ..... ...
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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.