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
81 Schirra - That's our liability with the window being on an external surface, You are that close to the top of the well, so you get incident light all over the place. O' Keefe - We don't want to create artificial problems here. That smoke scum on the window would not re ally distur b a s~el la s pec trum be cause the absorption would be broad hand and would not be confuse d with the stellar lines. Dunkelman - That's right. Tennyson - I was thinking about the I QSY phot ographs . Schirra - Yes, yes. Tennyson - We are going with the problem of, oh, the ultr a vi o le t and what is going to fog our nimbus pictures so to spe ak thro ugh th ese photographs, well, the same still unknown film on this thin (c ap s ule window) being reflected in sunlight at an unknown altitude through this window ... when you get through, what I'm saying is it would be very hard for us to tell from these weather bureau pictures, et c. (inaudible) Nordberg - Well, of course, but it's really more an intensity problem-just brightness rather .than spectral-I think spectral i s no t too much of a problem , but the fact that it just di ms thin gs un der certain angles makes me ... things that much clearer. But th is experiment you suggested there is a real excellent one (ref e rrin g to Dunkelman's. Schirra - Oh yeah. Dunkelman - Well, I mean it modifies it even more, makes it better because you can do the same thing outside at night in clear air -
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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.