Parts of Ilan Ramon's diary to be displayed at Israel Museum

The pages of text were found near the crash site of the Columbia shuttle.

After they are scanned, they will be transferred to the archives of the Israel Museum and a copy of the journal will be kept at the Ramon's house, as per a request by the astronaut's widow, Rona Ramon.

"Today was the first day that I felt that I am truly living in space. I have become a man who lives and works in space," Ramon wrote in an entry on his sixth day in space.

Tom Cook, the department director at Cook Markets Studio—those who are undertaking the scanning of the diary—explained that Ramon had kept the journal on his knees during the shuttle's return to Earth.

Some of the pages were consumed by the fire that resulted after the shuttle's explosion, but some others survived the explosion and the long fall to the ground.

According to Cook, the pages laid on the ground around the crash site for two months until they were found. "When the shuttle exploded, its parts were dispersed over an area of 2,500 square miles," Cook explained.

"Before the pages were located, they were exposed to all sorts of severe weather including strong winds and rain. When the search party found the pages, they brought them to the family.

"At the moment, after preservation work that took about half a year, most of the diary pages have been reconstituted, including pages where the ink had been erased. Now, we're engaged in a process of transcribing five journals, also for the (Ramon) family," Cook said.

"The original diary will not be on display for the public, a condition made by the laboratory at the museum," Cook continued.

Technical malfunction

Ilan Ramon died in February 2003 when NASA's Columbia space shuttle that was carrying him blew up on its return into the Earth's atmosphere. His body was found among pieces of the wreckage that were strewn across the state of Texas and it was brought to the cemetery at Nahalal for burial.

A NASA inquiry into the cause of the disaster found that an air bubble had caused damage to the craft's left wing. The bubble, created in the insulation layer covering the capsule, caused the expansion of an insulation tile and, at a certain point, this piece of the insulation broke off and struck the left wing of the shuttle violently.

The blow to the wing created a crack in the craft's thermal protection layer. During reentry into the Earth's atmosphere, this crack expanded as scalding hot gases entered into the small fissure and eventually led the shuttle to catch fire and break apart.