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
51 and you could see what you needed on the chart. Schirra - Now this could be practiced in a planetarium. O'Keefe - There are plenty of fluorescent inks. Schirra - This star chart thing was a real problem even to get it to the degree of refinement that I ~ad. Gill - It has a white background now? Schirra - We had to take the surface and sand it in a sens e to ge t it non - reflecting, because that was a problem. Dunkelmari - I want to caution you on that ultra violet light, though . It has to be very carefully designed, because if just a wee bit of 3615 leaks out of it; your eyeballs fluoresce. It must be carefully done. Schirra - I've become very interested in this as a problem in that on the Apollo mission, where you will need to find particular stars, we should have some kind of star map that you can see without blinding yourself. Those fingertips to me were awfully bright. Roman - You can ' t turn it down? Schirra - No. Gill - You must have been well dark - adapted? Schirra - Yes, that's right . I feel very strongly about this dark - adaptation, by the way. I have felt this way about this ever since I have been involved with this. As a night carrier-pilot, it was always a problem as you know. We would sit in the ready room with red lights on and red goggles on and we · then would go roaring up to flight deck and there would always be sbmebody there with a white light to shine right in your face .
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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.