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.
77 to me. I said, "Well I, that means I must go left," and as I came left, I started picking up other stars which became known to me through the starfield that I had rehearsed. Then the moon and Venus showed up and that was here. O'Keefe - It must be very difficult to pick up constellations when you have a starfield to look at that is as small as through your wind ow . Gill - It isn't .... Schirra - No, Orion, for example, was not included in t he windo w, so you might see the belt and that's about i~, or maybe one or two others in the constellation. That's about all. When you see something like Aldebaran, and the "v" (Hyades in the Constellation Taurus) - if you just saw that alone, you might very well get trapped, thinking it was the Pleiades , particularly, if you don't have an attitude. You know how well, I know you got trapped (turning to Dr. Gill) when we went into the Planetarium for the first t ime - things were inverted for you? Gill - Oh yes - yes, indeed. Schirra - When you have an unknown attitude , the star picture is bent out of shape . You can get into trouble fast. Nordberg - I .had a heck of a time the first time I was in Austr alia; it was difficult to recognize anything. Schirra - Isn't it! Yes and when we aren 't changing attitude and even when we know the starfield, it's not chan ging once youv 1 e seen it on the first orbit. So I was sitting there with the star
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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.