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.
46 anything else . So I was strictly looking, if you could almost say, I could even be looking straight up, which I know I wasn't. The stars were equally bright and equally in number almost on either side of this band. Dubin - It was about through the middle of the window? Schirra - That is correct . I went even as far as to say that it wasn ' t a third of the window and then I modified this down · to a fourth, but ~twas more than a fourth and less than a third. This means, in any case, that it's approximately ten degrees thick and this is a very rough estimate. O'Keefe - It wasn't the Milky Way? Schirra - No. No, ~ like to look at the Milky Way so I've seen it enough to say ".no." O'Keefe - Because you were facing according to your picture to - well - no - Sculptor, Fornax - no - Roman - The Milky Way in that part of the sky, should have a very distinct rift down the middle, it wouldn't be brightest to the center and shading off. Schi rra - Yes, in fact, if I recall from the way we ran the planetarium, the Milky Way was almost on my horizon. ~Dubin - How long can you see this by the way? Schirra - We can do this too, John. They have the Milky Way · projected on this chart. It is a very fine tool, I might add~ particularly when you want to reconstruct the crime. Gill - Might be very good practice afterwards for thq \ pilot to go
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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.