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.
“Gray”5 pages
78 chart, bending it around. (Laughter) Gill - It's very hard to get oriented. Dubin - Did you or Glenn or Carpenter see any meteors? Schirra - No, and we were naturally anxious to see them. I understand some little Japanese boy picked up one recently (Comet Ikey~). Isn't that right? That was a comet and we were looking for mbteors and comets and we never saw any. Dubin - And so you never saw any? Schirra - So I suspect that you have to see the meteors from t he surface of the earth. Dunkelman - No, again the field of view is too limited. Schirra - Again the odds are pretty grim. You take this lit tle window and you project it through 180 degrees, and it's pretty hard to see anything. That's why I say this lab (lunar module) is going to be fabulous. It really will ... That's practically a bird cage. Nordberg - How about the brightness of the sky looking as straight out as possible in the <laytime? Schirra - I have asked Gordon to go ahead and do this again an d concentrate on it. I did not, but in my recollection, I did not see anything in the heavens on the daylight side. I think what did this was the reflections off the window with this smoked over effect which made it even less visible. This film - back to the windshield thing - where the smoke is condensed on there - under the right lighting conditions you can barely see through one of these things. That's basically what happened there.
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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.