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.
“Gray”5 pages
55 Nordberg - I am curious if you ha<l a chance to observe variations of brightness around the horizon; around as far as possible (during) both in day and nighto Schirra - Again, the field of view isn't that big o I know just what you are asking faro I didn ' t take the liberty of making these, what would amount toi large yaw changes. I did no t have the opportunity to observe that transition. The field of view I had did not show these various changes . O'Keefe - You see, this is like 30 degrees, that's half a radius. I don't t hink he could see much more than you could see overhe ad at ni ght. Schirra - Yes. ovKeefe - It means that if he doesn't see patterns in the airglow from a single place at night, unless he has the freedom to yaw al l around, he doesn't have the opportunity of tracing out the rather large patterns which must be in the airglow. They are of the orde r of a thousand miles in diameter . Nordberg - I was also curious about daytime, because of the forward scattering and backscattering and 90° to the sun and actually, in daytime if your turnaround maneuvers arep s ay , t hey don 9 t go around in a plane tangential to the surface of the earth ? They go around in a radial plane, don 9 t they? Schirra - Well, this is the awful thing about our vehicle. All the thrusters are not aligned through the body axis, thereforep you get two and three axes when you ask for one. If you were trying to track the horizon, using the yaw input, say the horizon being like an arc here, you go like this. Then you ' ve got to roll p
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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.