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.
“Los Angeles Times”3 pages
., ' \': . ·,, 11 but · I think this is basically why we refer to the white particles as · frost because it does remind us of this. This is what probably tempts · me • to say that it has to be watero Cameron - Do you think the chartreuse ones were maybe the ones that Glenn· thought actually glowed, didnvt he? They were lighted wrong. Schirra· - I think - well this gets back · to my opinion and I saw myself on film yesterday at the press conference talking about it and said that I guess we need some more opinions but we ha~three opinions now and basically I put two together and made my · own, but the green I feel is strictly the case of the sunlight going through this tremendou~ amount of atmosphere at sunriseo What is left · as a light spectrum is this green - yellow on these particles. You can all explain this better than · I can, I am sure , but what gets through all this atmosphere would probab1y be this green - yellow. I think that in a sense they are not self-illumi nated · but they reflect as if they were self-illuminated. O'Keefe - Well, if you pass sunlight through a 1:hick layer of atmosphere then, of course, what you will get will be a red - a deep red - however, that doesn't necessarily. prove that you are wrong in what you are saying because the things would be illuminated in two ways . They would be illuminated not only by the direct sunlight~ but also by the scattered· light around the horizon which · you have photographed at sunrise and the combination of these two colors might give you a chartreuse as you have said because it is a double · illumination. However, there is another possible
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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.