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
25 we are going to see a batch of clouds if it's lighted. (the earth) That's really what I saw a lot of. I was just amazed. Obviously, when I flew over Africa, it was loud and · clear and you would see this if you were looking at Africa from some vantage point many, many miles away. I suspect that if you looked at earth from a long distance away that there is so much cloud cover that it might have an appearance much like Venus in this sense. Shoemaker - While we are on Africa, would you like to go on and talk about the ... (interruption) Schirra - You can't match my blues. Maybe Parish · could help ..• Nordberg - Does anyone have anything on the altitude, parti cular ly on that top that sort of turbulent thing? Schirra - That's another one you should check into. Through the trajectory tables, you should find my altitude. Now at this point, I was just passed Indian Ocean ship as I recall. O'Keefe - We've done all that. If you say when Mercury went through that we will tell you what the height was. (To Cameron) You have it? Cameron - I have it. It's about 280 kilometers ~ Height of the layers is about 66 kilometers. I only know the height of his observation, not knowing the width of it, O'Keefe - (to Schirra) But you made a mark when you went through it, The first "time hack" was when you weTe going through this turbulent area, right?
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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.