Astronaut Scientific Debriefings, 1962-1963

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18

It ran up and looked like it ran off the edge of a __. Then there were some white areas way up to the North and I imagine these were probably snow fields. I thought at the time they probably were but I couldn't be sure. I didn't specifically go over any area where I could look right down at this cloud and that snow. I was surprised at my--and another thing, as far as the weather goes, and that is what a tremendous area of the earth was covered by clouds that day. I don't know whether we're going to find that this is customary or not. But I was surprised. I had very little view of land.

X ....... (Statement, inaudible) .......

Yes. The intertropical __. We had been briefed on that and, of course, that took care of things all the way across the Pacific. There was cloud cover all the way across there. There was cloud cover over all Eastern Africa. I never saw the Lake Chad area that I was looking for. It was covered. The only part of Africa we really got a good look at was Western Africa in the desert regions. You could see the big dust storms blowing and these were very visible. I commented on it and Kenya came back and said yes that they had been having these dust storms for about a week. Tremendous blowing clouds of dust that obscured large--very large areas of the ground. Coming across the states end, this whole area across WI-NAS and Northern Mexico, Southern California and that area had very large cloud vision __ and high SER-OS clouds obscured vision from above. There were some breaks in it and you could see through momentarily.

What color were the dust clouds?

They just looked like dust. Brownish. XMBJ Just looked like a dust storm you've seen out on the desert. Some color. The colors from above looked--