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.
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68 on the axis which is easily the equivalent of 800 million candle poweroo osingle flare on the ground ooo Schirra - uh - huh -- O'Keefe - Well, I think 2 or 3 million is the biggest thing they ever tried to use o So the directed beam has quite a big advantage over the undirected beam, if people ' s orbital work is good enough . Schirra - Agreedo Our problem of course, is unless we have the win d0w , meaning, of course, attitude, fairly vertical in relation to the surface of the earth, you can ' t take advantage of this. This i s j ust the confined attitude that we 0 ve been flying ino ••o Shoemaker - I think this bears on another question that was submitted. I might read it and find out what else we can add to it. The ph otographs of terrain were not successful. Some of the trouble was obviously due to cloud cover, and some of the film was over exposed . Can you comment further on this, and do you have any suggestions for successful terrain ph6tography on future flights? Schirra - Yes, I do o I used a BIWI automatic light meter which is still ideal for the job 9 and again we were not briefed carefully enough on the BIWI automatic, and if I' had this to do again, I would get the manufacturer from BIWI to come down. In fact, many things I 've talked about for equipment, I would not ever -- I said this years before this flight, but while on the programo.oif I needed some information on the capsule, I would not feel adverse to callin g Mr. McD onell (McDonnell Aircraft) down, as an exampleo I f I had a BIWI exposure meter, I would like to have Mr. BIWI or whoe ver is
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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.