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
29 Schirra - And the rare occasions that I've had the timing for this. O'Keefe - There is a nice Delta Flight from Washington down to Houston. The thing goes exactly toward the sun - you can't miss it, Cameron - You'll have to go to the cockpit. Schirra - Hmm - You have to make the Delta Flight, in this par t i cu lar case, from Dallas to Los Angeles. I passed Albuquerque. Shoemaker - This peculiar thing you saw over Afri c a - maybe you c ould tell us about it. Sch i rra - That , as I have said, was my biggest surprise. I talked to most of you at great length about things we woul d hope to see or expect to see. This I had no prior knowledge of and I bas i cally can say that I was "sucked" in and originally called thi s airglow, if you recall. I guess it is best to refer back to the record again . This was S hours and 20 minutes. Cameron - That's the time I got from you. The only thing I notice from the script was that you said Glenn was asking you when you were passing over California if you had seen what the airglow was . Then you said something about you were surprised at how high it was . Schirra - This was the same phenomena. I had come back from there, think, isn't that correct? Let's see . Dubin - The Indian Ocean. O' Keefe - David Stern at Goddard predicted that you would see something very unusual in this flight before you went up . • 0 • Schirra - Really? I
Not linked to a story yet.
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.