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
65 the best print available, and I definitely have this group on that list. For one, I am disappointed that this occasion where I pu~led this Weather Bureau filter out of the back to take these two pictures of the moon, I have heard and I have yet to have seen the graphic results of those two black and whites on the moon, which are quite interesting to a lot of people. I have heard this. Now where they've gone, I don't know. Although I know they can be obtained again, I thou ght this was a shame. Tennyson - I don't think that I have ever seen these pri nts. And, we are in the office that supposedly collects the requ i re ments for meteorological satellites and I have not seen the direct prints of this. The only thing I have seen come out Schirra - Well, I have heard that if you take - and I haven't had the prerogative either - if you take the motion and project it on a very good s~reen, it is really something to see -- at least of these two lunar pictures. And that ' s why I took the Hasselblad . To take this big piece of emulsion - the 70 mm film rather than a 16 or 35 mm . - and this I do know about photography that the larger the strip of film, the more you will get out of it. That's why we went first class with a Hasselblad (camera) and why I am not at all in favor of taking a 16 mm. c amera along which is wh at we are using. Nordberg - We had, in the early days, right after MA-6, we had written to Kleinknecht and had gotten periscope film, which, you know what the quality is, and we got always the answer that they
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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.