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.
“Gray”5 pages
Scienti fic Debriefing -49- ( i hr . Voi~s: At retro fire, did you note feelings of lateral motion?11 r , pooper: On the third one, it gave me pretty good little boot in yaw. tI F ' il)r. Vons: This is distinguished from what you could see lookiig out? As I ., I :understand it, you felt the retro rockets but they didn't change your imprilssion that you were sitting stationary? Cooper : All I did was feel them and I still had the feeling I was moving right along. Dr. Vons: Did you feel you were moving backwards? Cooper : I ~ moving backWards in retro attitude, then you get quite a motion as I stated over the earth. Question: Did you have any sensations of change in attitude _between perigee and apogee, perhaps as a result of the amount of curvature you could see in the earth's surface? Cooper: No, I couldn't see any noticeable change in that. What was more distinct was whether you had haze or were in a clear area. Lou Fir.her: We identified one of your pictures taken vertical off Calcutta. Cooper: Did you note the one before that over the Rangoon area, with the little things out over the river; they look like warehouses or something? Fisher: Did you see ,Calcutta? I Cooper: No. Fisher : Did you see any airports? Cooper : Ye~, I saw numerous airports. The runway patterns show up very distinctly . .... 'I ------~--...---------:..,.----~- ' .',. ' ',q ... ..... ..,. -
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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.