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
62 yet to do this - in aircraft - in all the times I've been out there - see all of the Pacific. I have never had that opportunity, and I don't know that anybody ever will. Tennyson - I think what he was getting at is when in the TIROS satellite ~ the cottonpicker goes over and takes a picture perhaps of stratus deck which to a continual extent runs right up against the mountains that we know are snow-covered - wh e re one stops and the other begins, the snow and the stratus. It is difficu lt or impossible to tell. Schirra - No - well, my daytime was, of course, northern latitude, and this was basically summer. I was in the snow-capped Sierras . Nordberg - This question was really sort of just to make a po int, that if ever an astronaut goes into a polar orbit.~. Schirra - Yes. Nordberg - ... or has the opportunity to fly over the ice caps to look for this distinction, because this is something we find we are going to live with. Schirra - I have flown beyond a cloud deck in aircraft at 40,000 feet and had snow on the surface, and usually trees will come up out of the snow and then make you realize that you are no longer looki ng at a cloud surface. Tennyson - Well, our definition of a TIROS Satellite - because of the width of the TV raster - which is just not good enough to pick up trees with the wide angle and the mediocre lenses we use. Schirra - Well, yes. When you are low enough, you get these terrai n changes which helps you too, I think.
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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.