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
52 Dun ke i man - The Navy has done this very carefully. Schirra - It can be destroyed very rapidly. It turns out quite frequently when you are in a cockpit and you're time - critical, more so than when you are on a carrier deck fo r a night launch than when you are on the pad . Things are in a f r antic tempo . You make a very rapid checkout of the cockpit and you real l y don' t care about light adaptation . You just want to be sure that eve rything is in its proper position. So all of a sudde n - - bo om- -you are s hot off into the black and surprisingly you are very well adapted . I feel-- I know Scott has made a test on this -- ! think you come down to a very rapid adaptation in seconds and then you pro gress get ting be tter dark - adapted over many, many minutes. I know this has been documented. It is not worth trying to adapt to this exponential curve that yo u are trying to get hold of. Gill - Five minutes certainly helps a great deal. Schirra - I have said this in the past, for example, if it were night outside right now, we could ~tep outside that door. With t h i s lighting you have in here, you can see outside this door (assuming you are looking at the celestial night). You can see more th an I could see out of the window of the capsule with · perfect adaptation. I have done this. I have been in a lighted room since the fligh t and have stepped outside. Now we have done this frequently at the various control stations around the net. I did this at Guaymas which you well know is a tremendous place to look at stars. I wa lked out of a room just as lighted as this and got outside and boom, I saw more than I could see in the capsule.
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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.