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.
“Nevers”23 pages
75 0 1 Keefe - There's a 10,000 foot peak (Haleaki) or Maui. Dubin - How were you overall set for time? You were up to the sixth orbit and you had some trouble with your suit, so we found out. Did you have time to basically do more scientific work than you had the privilege of doing? Schirra - I think as we - and this is the trouble with Mercury because this is just about phasing out - as you get your confiden ce in the systems to where you don't need to monitor them as of te n, yo , could take time for observation. But you continually, at this st age of the game, cannot rely on the systems running themselves and so you keep carefully monitoring these things. This draws your attention away from, say a five minute observation. The only t ime that you could make a lengthy observation would be when you are under this automatic control when the capsule is maintaining its attitude for you rather than you trying to maintain it. This is very hard to do; to maintain a capsule attitude. In that it ' s a three - axis motion everytime you make one motion because each one is influenced by another axis thrusting. So as a result, it gets quite expensive fuel - wise to point your field of view at an obj ect. You have to sit there and just steam around like mad to do th is. Gill= Would you say that you ever had as much as five minutes at a time to look out of the window? Schirra - Oh, yes. I think I took a fairly long amount of time for example; observing this particular sunset that's repres ent ati ve of about three or four minutes. Even then, you keep checking thin gs to see if what you see is really what you are seeing. For example,
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Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 216 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.