Date:04/10/2008 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2008/10/04/stories/2008100456772000.htm

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Astronaut’s diary goes on display in Jerusalem

The pages that survived the Columbia space shuttle crash

— PHOTO: AP

MIRACULOUS FIND: Yigal Zalmona, a curator at the Israel Museum, displays pages from the diary of Ilan Ramon, an Israeli astronaut who died in the fatal mission of space shuttle Columbia, in Jerusalem.

JERUSALEM: Pages from an Israeli astronaut’s diary that survived the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia and a 37-mile fall to earth are going on display here this weekend for the first time.

The diary belonged to Ilan Ramon, Israel’s first astronaut and one of seven crew members killed when Columbia disintegrated upon re-entering the atmosphere on February 1, 2003. Part of the restored diary will be displayed at the Israel Museum from Sunday.

Survival

A little over two months after the shuttle explosion, NASA searchers found 37 pages from Ramon’s diary, wet and crumpled, in a field just outside the U.S. town of Palestine in Texas. The diary survived extreme heat in the explosion, extreme atmospheric cold, and then “was attacked by microorganisms and insects” in the field where it fell, said museum curator Yigal Zalmona.

“It’s almost a miracle that it survived — it’s incredible,” Mr. Zalmona said. There is “no rational explanation” for how it was recovered when most of the shuttle was not, he said.

NASA officials did not respond to requests for comment.

The U.S. space agency returned the diary to Ramon’s wife, Rona, who brought it to forensics experts at the Israel Museum and from the Israeli police.

Restoration

The diary took about a year to restore, Mr. Zalmona said, and it took police scientists about four more years to decipher the pages. About 80 per cent of the text has been deciphered, and the rest remains unreadable.

Two pages will be displayed. One contains notes written by Ramon, and the other is a copy of the Kiddush prayer, a blessing over wine that Jews recite on the Sabbath. Mr. Zalmona said Ramon copied the prayer into his diary so he could recite it on the space shuttle and have the blessing broadcast to earth.

Personal information

Most of the pages contain personal information which Ramon’s wife did not wish to make public, he said.

“We agreed to do the restoration completely respecting the family’s privacy and the sensitivity about how intimate the document is,” museum director James Snyder said.

The diary provides no indication Ramon knew anything about potential problems on the shuttle. Columbia’s wing was gashed by a chunk of fuel tank foam insulation at lift-off and broke up in flames just 16 minutes before it was scheduled to land at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. All seven astronauts were killed.