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.
45 in the airglow and I did not see it? Dunkelman - We are trying not t~ ~ (influence your reply). Schirra - ~laying one (response) against the other is indeed .. a good way of doing it. Dunkelman - Another think is that this was indeed brighter. Schirra - Bu~,_ well below.. . . Dunke l man - It is _possible that the normal ai rg low was the ire but you didn't see it? Schirra - It was well below my field of view though. Dunkelman - But are we sure? I assumed that it was well below, too, but . . . Schirra - Yes. I saw what amounted to a clear starfield below this . . . Dunkelman - About how many degrees worth though? Schirra - I was just trying to think - Well, the window itself - I'm just trying to think what I can see degrees-wise-this is - Cameron - Thirty degrees . Schirra - It was roughly thirty _degrees. O' Keefe - But there is a trap here because that window shapes out at such a steep angle - that if you attempt to· estimate height by estimating portions of the window-- Schirra - Oh, no, I wasn't doing that. All I am trying to say is that i n the window - included in the window - let~s forget this smog band, it were stars only, it was below the window which would be the earth . There was no horizon and even if I could have been inverted, we could just say that the window would be this · way. There was still no earth vision, nothing of earth I could see, including airglow or
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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.