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.
• 5 not that much of an artist or poet, but I was trapped with this set of blues and I did expand on it at greath length, I thought. These electric blues - O' Ke efe - (Interrupting) Subtraction is what it sounds like. Schirra - So it connotes ozone in that sense - electric blue - is exactly what it looked like, A very, very satisfying color. Dr . Roman - Coming back to the color of Mercury, do I gather from your comment that you feel it was distinctly yellow, yellowish f or example, or was it that you didn't pay a great deal of attention to? Schirra - No, Nancy, I would say it is very much like any other star that · I would see, rather than having a color. I didn't detect a color. Dr. Roman - Astronomers think of stars as having color, Schirra - I have seen different-colored stars from earth-bound environment and anticipated or, in fact,I was looking for different colored stars or planets and did not detect any colors. Roman - This means that your background was just a little too bright to see colors. Schirra - That, and the window itself just isn't an optimum plate - series of plates - to look thro~gh. I insisted that what I really felt had happeried is that I was seeing no more than about 5th or 6th magni t ude stars · that the clouding of the · windows, as a result of the escaped rocket, reduced my visibility of the stars about one magnitude. In other words there wasn't gross clouding of the win dow . That is what I was trying to make clear by using magnitude of stars as the yardstick in this case. I'll stick with that. This
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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.