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
41 (Conversation inaudible) Schir~a - I used to carry my little star chart slide rule thing around with me . Roman - Alternatively, there are some (star) clusters - we l l, if it ' s the Pleiades, it would be well enough defined and you wouldn't confuse it - there are some clusters in a star field which · at · fir s t glance give you the same haziness that you get from a cluster like the Pl eiades . Cameron - It ' s the wrong di rection, of course. Roman - Well, but he is down in the Scorpio region if you think of it . Schirra - One of those things I do recall very vividly was that I .talke d about Aldebaran and it just couldn't have been there at t he time I .... Gill = O, well maybe you didn ' t have the Pleiades then. Schirra - I know it wasn't . It wasn't the Pleiades . Gill - Because you ' ve got Orion here. Orion, the Pleiades and Aldebaran go nicely together. Schirra - They sure do, _but they shouldn't be there. fill!. - But those were the wrong ones . (Laughter) They can't be there . Dunkelman - I think Voas corrected that at that one time. You see Aldebaran wasn ' t there . Schirra - Yes, this is the liability you get into if you don't really know your attitude; with this star chart you can sweep out a whole new segment of the sky . O' Keefe = Why can't you have seen Aldebaran and these other things? Were they above the horizon?
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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.