Astronaut Scientific Debriefings, 1962-1963

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, ,cientific Debriefing
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j he Ear,t coast. But there was a quite a bit of clouds up north, broken clouds.
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faul Low.man:
Were there any up.usu.al terrain features?
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-gooper:
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-~ k. O'Keefe: .Did you see anything that looked like a crater?
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ICooper:
No.
I sure didn't. I was looking for it too.
Paul Lowman:
You· went over one in Ghana, but I don't know if it ·was good or
not.
Cooper:
Over Africa there was unasua.l rocky terrain up in the Atlas mountains.
I didn' t see any craters.
Dr. Voas :
Do you--could you see clouds and shore lines at night with no moon?
Cooper:
Fairly well. If there was no moon you could see them faintly.
Dr. Voas : Any other terrain features that you could see? At night with no ~oon?
Cooper: •No . Not much.
You could see the moonlight on the water.
Dr. O'Keefe: You mentioned these small particles.
Do I understand correctly
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that they seemed to,be pushed outward from the capsule?
Cooper: If you consider this west and this east 8.lad the spacecraft is going east,
regardless of spacecraft attitude, if any time I fired one of the thrusters at
night, I could see glow from almost every one of the thrusters. The pitch-down
thruster I could see and the yaw I could see sh(?rtly after they got out of the
nozzle. You get tremendous streams of luminous particles of fireflies, and
regardless of what attitude you were in, ther appeared to come out from the
spacecraft. A grea1; many could be seen for some period imd they seemed to go
back along flight path.
•Dr. Vo~s : Did they,actually appear to flow around? Would you say now that they were
parallel ~ ~s they go back, they will appear ·optically to come together. But did
they act ually curve around as if there was a flow field.
Cooper:
I felt they were actually moving around. Their relative movement was
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