Astronaut's notes from shuttle crash are restored

Published on Saturday 26 February 2005 12:30

A SMALL heap of paper that survived the disintegration of doomed 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.

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. It revealed the flight diary and notes of Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon.

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

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, a blessing for wine.

Altogether, 18 pages handwritten in Hebrew were recovered: four sheets held Ramon’s diary during the flight; six were technical notes that had been made before launch; and eight were personal notes, also written before lift-off.

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," Ms Brown said.