Astronaut Scientific Debriefings, 1962-1963

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4
Schirra - Again, Larry, do you have that?
(Referring to drawing
prepared by W. Cameron and L. Dunkelman)
Mr . · Dun-ke Iman -
We have.
Schirra -
We sat down for about an hour and traced this very
carefully.
Mr . Dunkelman - It happens that the movement of Mercury behind
our atmosphere is really not phenomenally related to airglow as
such .
Mercury is simply a pointer - an index finger.
It gave us
a chance to see what parts of the upper atmosphere you were looking
at and this has more to do with ozone and atmospheric constituents
than it has to do with airglow.
We think the answer here lies in
the fact that the ozone is absorbing the orange, yellow, and green
light and leaves this interesting blue which is an ozone blue
rather than a Rayleigh blue and we think the reason why Astronaut
Schirra saw the several shades of blue is he may have been looking
edge - on at the ozone layer.
So it is really not so much related to
airglow as it is to the way of looking at what produces the color.
I think we are interested in finding out what causes the phenomenon,
rather than to attempting to learn anything new about the atmos­
phere .
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Schirra - I think one of the reasons that· I was so enthused about
tracking Mercury through these colors is that I am a fan of blue
colors .
I grew up with a Maxfield Parish painting; if anybody
knows his colors of blues - they are fantastic.
Gold blues,
electric blues .
As a result, these caught my attention.
I am