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
83 I admit this is my old pitch, but still he will have a lot of time to do things. So he has a number of experiments on his flight and he definitely will perform these . Now , in my case once I solved the suit circuit problem, I really didn 9 t have many problems. Frankly, none to speak of. But, again to conserve the energy to stay in orbit meaning the control fuel and the electrical powerp I had to throw away control attitudes. Once you try to get a control attitud back again, you 0 ve got to bring all electrical power back on the line. You have to use a sizeable chunk of the control fuel. Thi s cost us dearly with this weight - limited system. The way to get around this, of course, is to have a larger field of view, since you don't need to move the vehicle as much, and this is, I can already see, the first salvation on this and this is the lunar module in earth orbit . The Gemini has even less field of view than Mer cury. Apollo has possibly as much per man . To get a large field of view in space the first time, we can do it with the vehicle that isn °t going to re - enter (lunar module) - basically that 0 s what it amounts to . ordberg = I think it 0 s really fantastic that you fellows have seen what you have seen with such limitations. I think it re ally probably is one of the reasons that people like ourselves are used t o just l ooking at one dial and we stand in the laboratory and r ead one meter. These fellows are really looking fo r everything. Schirra - Wellp I think that this is part of what fell out of the criteria that we were selected from, and that is the inquisitive mind.
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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.