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
36 my dark adaptation and light up my star chart and then identify these things. This is the problem we have. O'Keefe - One of the classic problems in astronomy - one of the solutions for it is to illuminate with a red light, because you don't destroy the dark adaptation so quickly. Schirra - This is why we went to these fingerti.P lights which are red . I started out, and this might interest you, I went to the planetarium in Chapel Hill and took both gloves with me. One had white lights and one had the red lights. This was my test of these lights. We used them while working in the planetarium. We lit up the white lights and the whole dome was just brilliant white. These are tiny little peanut bulbs, really minute. This was the last time I used those white lights. That very day - they were painted red as a result of this . You need very, very low orders of light to - Dunkelman - I had the impression the first time we talked about this that you had not seen any stars through the patch, this brownish patch, but you feel that you had seen - Schirra - Yes sir, this is what I am trying to do; recreate the scene . That is why I went back to coming off Africa. Having looked for the lights, and having seen Capetown, I then felt that I was seeing more city lights and then I was so surprised to realize that these were stars. Now this only means that I was not pitched down enough to really see the earth itself. So this means that it was quite high. Roman - Do you feel that you were looking at the airglow laye r s a t sunset or might you have been looking down at this sort of tangentially as you are at some angle?
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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.