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
79 Nordberg - How about color? Was it very dark blue? Schirra - Oh it went from blue to black. Not an appealing blue by any means. Dunkelman - Well, really to be fair to an astronaut, one ought to take a replica of the window and go in the dark room and illuminate it side-wise with a xenon arc or a solar simulator or somethi ng that will come near it and then look out and see what you c an 'see, and I am afraid that it is going to be pretty miserable. Nordberg - It worked well in an experiment. Dunkelman - I think it should be done ... it's the sort of thing yo u should do. Schirra - We continually do this in airplanes at 50,000 feet in daylight and the sky is quite dark. It's very dark to you. It turns out that all this incident light that's re f lecting around this panel - just b~cause its plastic, it feeds light through it much like a fibre optics system and becomes a glowing panel that you are looking through here . O'Keefe - The full moon which is as "black" as ... yet we all · know that the full moon just about blasts the sky. That means that if when you are lookin g out of that window, you see any object which is illuminated by the sun, and which is as big as one-inch ten feet away, you've got the equivalent of illumination by the full moon in terms of you know, disturbing your adaptation. Schirra - Oh yes. O'Keefe - Even if it's painted black and of course, you are not likely to be that lucky ... you are likely to have some nice, bright
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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.