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.
“Gray”5 pages
42 Schirra - I don't think they are in this area. We have to expand this star chart . Now if I were yawed around 90 degrees, this star chart is absolutely worthless because this only goes a plus or minus 60 degrees . O' Keefe = I know, I know .. . Sch i rra = Maybe I could have 0 00 o °Keefe = But, your flight path did go over Aldebaran, Orion - the plane of the orbit. Schirra - As I recall , and my memory of course, is suffering from the time span (which has elapsed since the flight on October ~ .5-,. 1962 . ) As I recall, Orion was on the daylight s i de, you see it's . .. Roman = As I say, I was going to say that Orion was actually very late = just before dawn - if it were up at all. Schirra = Physically it was impossible to see - here is the constella tion Orion way down here ~ in time, this is on my daylight side . Roman = I would think that Aldebaran would be much the same problem. Cameron = Just the same thing . Schirra = It is right in this same family, of course. Roman = What time of night was this? Can you give me any idea of the distance between sunlight and sunset? Schirra = That vs why I am perfectly convinced that I could not possibly see anything associated with the constellation Orion or Aldebaran . With this star chart, Nancy, what we do is have a time margin . (Looking at the chart .) Now Orion down here is actually in my local daylight . It just was impossible for me to see it at this point way back here . It was occluded frank ly by the
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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.