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.
out see t Sci entific Debriefing -21- /' I 1, ,, , i (McKe e continued) you say why you saw such small items? ii, ,\ • ! ~ l '' Coo;pcr: I was coming :f'rom Houston the other day in a 102 and I not ed I coulcln't see nearly as clear around ·40,000 feet, particularly in one area,.. . that I was in. There was · a lot of haze and it .was quite humid and I couldn ' t I disti nguish things on the ground very well but yet when I got into the west coast of Florida and got into an area that was somewhat clearer, at t h e same altitude I could see many things. I think again, that it depends on how much humidity _you have and how much haze is in an area. I passed right over the vicinity of Los Angeles and San Diego and never saw them at all. I waoo't , very surprised. I could see where they were but I couldn't see them. I passed right over Miami and Miami Beach and I could see that there was a t 'own there . . Ther~ was a lot of build up and civilization. I could see the streets but the buildings were not very distinct. But yet over areas of El Centro:·and the Salton Sea and ·the dry lake areas I could see tremendously greater detail, 8J1.IJ. individual roads. Over the Himalayas, up in Tibet, of course there you'r~ above a good portion a certain amount of the atmosphere , J • i I suppose, I was really surprised: what I could see. I found some real detai ls and little , villages with maybe 20 or 30 houses I suppose, stood outi ' • • very distinctly. You .could estimate the number of houses and if a house was individually away f'rom ahythirig else I guess against the right color background, the yard, I could discern individual buildings. I saw a number of t h em with smoke1 coming out of the chimney. There was snow on this upper very sandy blowy, dusty; Tibetan are.a. I could see a lot of lakes some partial.ly.y f'roz en over and some f'rozen solid. The visibility was tremendous. I could vehicles that ,:;t assumed were trucks. I could see them kicking up ' dust. ... :.
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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.