DIARIES of the deceased are often poignant, but rarely more so than this. The charred and tattered pieces of the diary of Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon, who died along with six others when the space shuttle Columbia fell apart on re-entry in February 2003, have been painstakingly pieced together by forensic scientists.
The pages were found in April 2003 in San Augustine county in Texas and handed over to Ramon's wife. She gave them to Sharon Brown at the Questioned Documents Laboratory at the Israel police national headquarters in Jerusalem. Brown's team used infrared light and digital image processing to reconstruct the writing on some seemingly blank pages. Brown presented the results at the American Academy of Forensic Sciences conference in New Orleans last week.
The reconstructed diary, written in Hebrew, covers events from the day Columbia took off to day six of the flight. Brown says that the pages contained technical notes written before the mission, a Sabbath prayer and other jottings. "It's amazing that these papers were even found," Brown says.
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