Columbia Astronaut's Diary to go on Display in Jerusalem

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Ilan Ramon, one of the seven astronauts who perished in the 2003 Columbia disaster kept a diary which was found wet and a bit worn for the journey to space and back. Exposed to the elements after surviving the heat of the explosion and the cold of the atmosphere, it fell 37 miles to earth and was later recovered.

Yahoo! News:

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, 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," Zalmona said. There is "no rational explanation" for how it was recovered when most of the shuttle was not, he said.

The diary was returned to Ilan's widow, Rona, who had forensic experts from the Israel Museum and the Israeli Police work on the restoration, which took about a year, and about four years to decipher. About 80 percent of the book has been deciphered, the rest is unreadable.

Of the two pages that will be on display are entries made my Ramon and a Yiddish prayer said as a blessing over wine on the Sabbath. Ramon copied the prayer to read it in space and have the blessing broadcast to earth.

Most of the diary contains personal information and the family's privacy is being respected. They have agreed to share the two pages that will go on display as one of a collection of famous documents from Israel's 60 year history.

Yahoo! News:

Also on display will be Israel's 1948 declaration of independence, the 1994 peace treaty with Jordan and a bloodstained sheet of paper with lyrics to a peace anthem that was carried by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at the time of his assassination in 1995.

Ramon's diary gives no indication that he knew about potential problems on the shuttle, which disintegrated just minutes before it was scheduled to land at Kennedy Space Center, in Florida. A gash in Columbia's wing caused by a piece of foam insulation that fell off the fuel tank at liftoff caused the shuttle to explode, killing all seven members on board.