[meteorite-list] nearly on-topic

From: Darren Garrison <cynapse_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Sat Feb 26 14:58:18 2005
Message-ID: <1gl1215ci8luikdmp04nl2tj1rfjieic18_at_4ax.com>

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7034817/

Fallen astronaut?s diary recovered
Experts piece together notebook used by Israeli
during Columbia mission
Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon, shown here in training for spaceflight, kept a diary during the
ill-fated Columbia shuttle flight. Now parts of that diary have been recovered and restored.
The Associated Press
Updated: 4:10 a.m. ET Feb. 26, 2005

NEW ORLEANS - A small heap of paper that survived the fiery disintegration of space shuttle
Columbia, a 38-mile fall to Earth and two months of exposure to rain and sun in a Texas field has
been painstakingly restored by forensic scientists, yielding the flight diary and notes of Israeli
astronaut Ilan Ramon.

Scientists used computer image-enhancement technology and infrared light to read the charred and
tattered pages and pieced some of them together like jigsaw puzzles.

Not everything could be deciphered. But Sharon Brown, the Israeli police document examiner who
pieced the material together, said she was amazed that the metal-ring cardboard-bound notebook had
even survived.

?You know what a lit match could do to that pile of papers,? she said this week at a convention in
New Orleans of forensic scientists.

Text of a Sabbath blessing
She would not disclose any personal observations by the astronaut, one of the seven crewmen killed
when the shuttle broke apart in February 2003. But the pages included a list of topics Ramon planned
to talk about during broadcasts from space, and the carefully copied-down text of the Sabbath
kiddush, the blessing for wine.

All together, 18 pages handwritten in Hebrew were recovered: Four sheets held Ramon?s diary during
the flight; six were technical classroom notes that had been made before launch; and eight were
personal notes, also written before liftoff.

On some pages, the writing was washed out. Some sheets were tattered and torn, pocked with tiny
irregular holes as if debris had ripped through them. Pieces were twisted into tightly crumpled wads
smaller than a fingernail. Some pages were stuck tightly together and had to be delicately pried
apart.

Brown said she had been asked if she was afraid she would destroy the shreds by opening them up. ?I
said, ?You?re right. But if I do nothing, we?ll lose it all,?? she recalled.

Papers found two months after disaster
Ramon, an Israeli war hero, was his country?s first astronaut. An Indian tracker found the papers
two months after the shuttle disaster. Ramon?s widow, Rona, asked Israeli police to find out what he
had written. After 1? years, Brown still has two pages of writing she has not been able to decipher.

On one section where the writing had been washed out by rain, neither infrared nor ultraviolet light
was any help. Brown took the pages to a colleague who scanned them into a computer and processed
them with photo-editing software, using techniques to enhance contrast and separate the writing from
the background.

The diary, written in black ink and pencil, covers only the first six days of the 16-day mission.
?We don?t know whether he just stopped writing, or ran out of paper, or other pages were destroyed,?
Brown said.

She said that because the notebook was the personal property of Ramon?s widow, she tried to piece it
together without actually reading it, as if it were a puzzle in a language she had never seen.

?But very soon, I realized that was exactly the opposite of what I had to do,? Brown said. She said
she could not piece it together without understanding it.
Received on Sat 26 Feb 2005 03:05:38 PM PST