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.
“Nevers”23 pages
• 4 Schirra - Again, Larry, do you have that? (Referring to drawing prepared by W. Cameron and L. Dunkelman) Mr . · Dun-ke Iman - We have. Schirra - We sat down for about an hour and traced this very carefully. Mr . Dunkelman - It happens that the movement of Mercury behind our atmosphere is really not phenomenally related to airglow as such . Mercury is simply a pointer - an index finger. It gave us a chance to see what parts of the upper atmosphere you were looking at and this has more to do with ozone and atmospheric constituents than it has to do with airglow. We think the answer here lies in the fact that the ozone is absorbing the orange, yellow, and green light and leaves this interesting blue which is an ozone blue rather than a Rayleigh blue and we think the reason why Astronaut Schirra saw the several shades of blue is he may have been looking edge - on at the ozone layer. So it is really not so much related to airglow as it is to the way of looking at what produces the color. I think we are interested in finding out what causes the phenomenon, rather than to attempting to learn anything new about the atmos phere . • Schirra - I think one of the reasons that · I was so enthused about tracking Mercury through these colors is that I am a fan of blue colors . I grew up with a Maxfield Parish painting; if anybody knows his colors of blues - they are fantastic. Gold blues, electric blues . As a result, these caught my attention. I am
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Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 216 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.