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
72 O'Keefe - I think this is swamp and it's very shallow. Gill - You never would see it then. Shoemaker - In photographs I've seen from previous flights, both Glenn's and Carpenter's flfghts, I think we got some pictures on Africa, and I was quite interested in these because they begin to show up the structurep the bedding, etc. Schirra ~ Yes, I was looking for this particularly over Africa and South America because this was supposed to be real prime in transi tion on the northwest part of South America which was really a beauty when you visualize how you hit that with the 6th orbit, and I didn't have that prerogative either. Yes, when you come down to it, this was all primed for geologic study, I thought ... Even Cuba was hard to see. (Laughter) Cameron - Did you see anything -on the order of craters? Schirra - No, this is not the map I flew with by the way - sort of blocked out for specific attention. I frankly was very disappointed about the cloud cover. I think you've detected that anyway. That doesn't go too far No rth and South you are in this tropical zone which is the cloudiest part of the earth.> Schirra - Yes. O'Keefe - It is most systematically cloudy. If you can go just a little further north and south, the chance of get ting this weather will be better, although this would probably always be true, just as you've said, that most of the earth at any one time will be cloudy. This belt goes from about 35 degrees North to 35 degrees south. You didn't quite get an inclination of about 33 degrees.
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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.