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.
“Hill”1 page
35 everybody thinks that all you see is Perth! (laughter) Well, we see a lot of other places as well." To go back, I was · trying to re - establish this phenomenon in my mind so I had passed over Africa and I was darkened within the vehicle. I was drifting. As I was drifting - we like to say that we can see a city because the people of the city get quite excited about it as we know Perth did - and I was proceeding across the Indian Ocean drifting, so my attitudes cannot be defined, I wanted to say to myself, oh ·, · I see some more cities below me. Now I wasn't convinced in my mind that I was over the Indian Ocean, yet with the attitudes · not carefully defined, I might well have seen cities , These I said, ah, those ci t ies are quite constellation setups. They looked like constellations. Then I said, my gosh! they are constellations. They are stars and this was below what I then, in my mind at least, had planted as airglowo Again, a lump term, meaning a lighted horizon, and I looked above this brown smog effect and saw more stars again. Then I could see through this brown effect, stars, but they were · dimmed considerably by it. Now, I did not have the opportunity in that the attitudes were dynamic to trace an individual star or planet through this particular areao I wasn't at this point too intereste d in knowing what constellations I was looking at. In drifting fli ght, you don't really have a requirement to navigate, that is, to know where you are in relation to a star field or surface. Roman - So you don't know what you were looking at? Schirra - So any particular star or constellation, I could not ident i fy at this timeo If I needed to, I would then have to destroy
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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.