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.
“Pacific Ocean”1 page
69 the man to brief me on it, and I since have read up a little bit further on this exposure meter and there is a little soft, white cap that goes over the eye of the exposure meter which takes diffused light o It doesn ' t change the light meter reading, but it basically ~hen takes an average of all the ligh t it sees o Now when I was ~ using it, I didn °t have this cap on there and I then got the brightest light of some area and that ' s why we overexposed the fil m Nordberg ~ Yes, yes oo o it's very simple ooo Schirra - It 0 s as basic as that , and that ' s why I over - exposed these light values that I came back with and which were recorded are really of no great value because of this, I think. I t's a small focus - the exposure meter is just about that size cubed (demonstrating) it 0 s a beautiful little piece of equipment and quite accurate o We had a calibrator, but it should have been (capped) ooo Gordon Cooper knows this and will have a cap on his , I might add o Nordberg - Have all pictures been overexposed? Schirra = No, I looked out on occasion where I would be looking at an almost uniformly lighted area such as the surface of the earth o When I had the horizon in the picture, we usually overexposed because I had two different light levelso Dunkelman - Well, the pity of it all is, since you do need an exposure meter to get a good picture, and exposure meters give you a number, it's too bad the numbers isn ' t available. Schirra - I did record these . Dunkelman - Sooner or later these numbers are going to give you a
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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.