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.
“Nevers”23 pages
48 than beat this any further, it's circumbent on us to go to the planetarium and really nail this down. All I have to do is just take this window box we have and just move it around and - ah ha - there it is. • ·ounkeiman - Something we would li ke to know is the dimming ef f ect . Schirra - Uh huh. Dunkelman - You say that this patch was quite bright, that's on e t hi ng > and then was it quite bright because it appeared bright or because there are many, many fewer stars. This is the question we have to answer . Schirra - Right. You know what went through my mind when · I f in ally realized what I was looking at? I was livid about the fact th at I had the periscope. Absolutely livid, because · I would have shot up a whole roll of film right on that (using uv spectrograph). (Laughter) I was fighting for that thing and that's why you can look · through and I make perisocpe sound like a dirty word. All through here the wo r d periscope is shortened to four letters practically. (Laughter) Shoemaker - Why don't we go on. Jocelyn, why don't you get together with Cdr . Schirra and write a conclusion on this. Schirra ~ We'll set up a rendezvous here. Shoemaker - I think we have covered quite a few of the remainder· of the questions partly in discussion. I would like to go back to ' dark adaptation here which is the next question. You have talked about i t and let's see whether there are any points that we havenJt • covered . The question is would you tell us when you think you were best dark-adapt ed? Was there any time during flight when you employed only red light in the
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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.