DIARY OF AN ASTRONAUT

Examination of the remains of the late Israeli astronaut Colonel Ilan Ramon’s Crew Notebook recovered after the loss of NASA’s Space Shuttle Columbia.
Sharon Brown, Questioned Documents Laboratory
Laser Sin-David, Photography Laboratory
Division of Identification & Forensic Science, Israel Police HQ

NASA’s Space Shuttle Columbia, flight STS-107, took off from the Kennedy Space Center on 16 January 2003 for a 16-day mission. While orbiting the earth, the seven-man crew, including Israel’s first astronaut Colonel Ilan Ramon, conducted a wide variety of experiments and intermittently stayed in contact with earth through email and carefully timed public announcement broadcasts.
On re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere on February 1st, the Space Shuttle broke up, most likely as a result of damage inflicted to the spacecraft soon after takeoff; all seven crewmembers tragically perished.
Two months after the disaster, during extensive searches to recover any material that may have survived the crash, a pile of papers containing Hebrew writing was found in a field in San Augustine County, Texas, Figure 1.

Figure 1 - Remnants of Colonel Ilan Ramon’s Crew Notebook as found in a field in San Augustine County, Texas

Once it had been verified that the pages were relevant to the Shuttle debris, the papers were collected and given to Colonel Ramon’s family.There was never any question regarding the authenticity of Ramon’s handwriting, which had been verified by his wife, Rona. She decided to bring the papers to Israel for deciphering the damaged writing and, ultimately, conservation of the torn and tattered pages.
It should be noted that there is no information available as to where the pages of the Crew Notebook were situated during reentry, for example if they were in a pocket of Ramon’s spacesuit or in a padded, heat resistant container or simply held under his leg (as suggested by one astronaut).
Although the whole pile of paper had presumably suffered the same traumatic conditions of highly elevated temperatures when the Shuttle exploded, plus the approximately -60°C atmospheric temperature at the altitude where it broke up, its long fall to earth and exposure to at least several days of wet weather while strewn in a field during February and March, the papers showed a diversity of damage and could be split into four groups.
The first group comprising eight sides of paper (four pages written in black fluid ink and four sides of paper in pencil) were torn to varying degrees but were barely charred and did not show any signs of water damage to the writing although the ruled lines on the first three pages were totally washed out. These pages constituted Ramon’s personal diary, written while in space and were readily legible where not torn.
When the diary was handed over for examination, it was stressed that its contents were to be kept well guarded and secret, as they were the personal property of Ramon’s family.
In order to conform to this wish, I had hoped to delve as little as possible into the content of the diary and stick to piecing together the fragments like a puzzle. However, I soon realized that in order to attain any measure of success, it would be necessary to totally familiarize myself with Ramon’s handwriting style and become immersed in the content of the diary so as to be able to anticipate the words or letters that were missing in the hope of finding them amongst the ink deposits on the curled and twisted fragments.
The paper of the diary’s pages was quite badly torn in places; some areas had been pierced by foreign objects and the writing in those areas physically removed.  The writing that had not been torn away was easily legible, although there were several segments across tears in the paper where the writing was more difficult to decipher. Furthermore, some of the pages were tightly stuck together and had to be pried apart carefully. At the same time, the pages were very fragile and along with the main body of paper there were several twisted or tightly curled fragments that had either broken off during the straightening process or were received separately from the rest of the pages. When straightened out, it was a challenge to correctly place those fragments that contained remnants of writing in their original locations.The size, shape and contours of a fragment indicated where it might fit in holes found in the tattered pages.
The entire diary covers the period from liftoff to flight day six (FD 6). It is not known if there were more pages of the diary that were not found or if Ramon stopped writing at this point.
It is important to point out that when deciphering the contents of the diary, an educated guess was most valuable. After deliberating over certain entries for quite some time, a member of the Israel Air Force who had been involved in the Israeli experiments on board the Shuttle read those entries quite effortlessly.
The proper placement of the fragments made several words of the diary legible, whereas beforehand one could only guess what those words may have been. One of the most interesting discoveries resulted from positioning a rather large fragment on the first page of the diary, Figures 2a-2c.

    
Figure 2a - Fragment                 Figure 2b - Gap in page

 
Figure 2c - Placement of the fragment in the gap in the page – the arrows show the contours of the whole fragment

With placement of the fragment the passage (translated here into English) reads as follows:

 “The last traditional breakfast on Earth,
Get dressed in spacesuits, play the traditional card game till
the last few seconds, go down in the elevator, out
to the astrovan with the last hand waves, the way to” …

It seemed somewhat strange that the astronauts played cards after they had put on their bulky spacesuits and we wondered if the fragment had been placed correctly, although its contours and ink deposits matched the gap in the page very well. Two NASA astronauts were asked if they knew anything about the card game, but both replied that as they had yet to take part in an actual space flight, they did not know of any such tradition. Colonel Ramon’s family and friends also had no light to shed on the question.
Three weeks later we received a reply from one of the NASA astronauts who had asked around and learned that some crews did have a tradition to play a game of cards before the launch, believing it would bring them luck.
This information would have been lost without the correct placement of this particular fragment.
All in all, approximately ten fragments were returned to their original locations.
The second group of papers consisted of six pages of water-damaged paper – the blue ruled lines were very blurred and no writing remnants were visible to the naked eye; the paper was slightly charred along the edges, but not torn to the extent of the first group.
The pages were viewed with various light wavelengths, from the ultraviolet to the infrared using the VSC-1 (video spectral comparator), Foster + Freeman, England.
With infrared luminescence, it was found that the pages contained technical lists made in preparation for the mission including lists of NASA personnel, lists of medicines for different medical conditions relevant to space flight and various safety and operating procedures.
Although the luminescence in the central areas of the pages was strong enough to “blind” the camera, a good part of the writing was deciphered.

The third group of pages proved to be the most challenging as they had very faintly visible remnants of writing in blue ink – enough to tease the eye in seeing that something had been written there, but nowhere near clear enough to decipher the content. The paper was slightly charred along the edges, slightly torn, and slightly water damaged.
The first page had clear remnants of a washed out blue ink, showing that the whole page had once been full of writing. Although several individual letters could be discerned, hardly one complete word was clearly legible. The other pages were even more affected and hardly any letters could be read.
Ultraviolet and infrared light did not help to view the writing any more clearly than regular white light. It was decided to try digital enhancement photography in an attempt to enhance the contrast of the traces of pale blue writing.
Amazingly, after several hours of working with computer image-enhancement software, Adobe Photoshop and ImagePro, on a page that appeared almost blank to the naked eye, a whole side of writing was visualized on the computer screen and printed out on high quality photographic paper. Even after visualizing the writing it still took many hours to decipher what exactly had been written.
The page seemed to contain a list of topics that Ramon had prepared before the mission, intending to talk about them during one of the public announcement broadcasts from space.
The second page showed slight traces of blue ink all over, but where on the first page several letters were legible, here only one square bracket could be made out, Figure 4.

    
(left)Page Showing No Remnants Of Writing    (right)Same page after processing with Photoshop™ and Image-Pro Plus™ - “Kiddush”
Figure 4 – Digital Enhancement with Photoshop™ and Image-Pro Plus™

Once again, after processing with Photoshop, a complete page of writing was visualized. The content was in Hebrew like in all the other pages examined so far, but in contrast to them, this writing was punctuated with vowels. On close examination several key words were recognized that led to deciphering the entire page – Ramon had copied out the special Sabbath blessing for wine, “Kiddush”. He intended to say the “Kiddush” blessing on Friday night (sunset on Friday marks the beginning of the Jewish Sabbath), and had prepared the cup and the blessing accordingly.
Two of the pages contain handwritten notes in Hebrew that have yet to be deciphered. As in examination of all the pages that were found, an educated guess is better than a random one, so that where there is no clue as to what the writing may contain it is very difficult to make head or tail of the content.
The fourth group of pages contained printed technical information. No reconstruction work was required here in order to read their content but these pages may be examined in the future to learn more about the effects of the explosion of the Shuttle on the papers’ makeup.
Conclusion
The examination of Colonel Ilan Ramon’s Crew Notebook proved to be a fascinating case.
Everyone had felt the tragic loss of the Shuttle’s seven astronauts. Over two months after the accident, the discovery of the Notebook provided the chance to learn more about the mission through the diary written by Ilan Ramon, Israel’s first astronaut.
The variety of techniques ultimately used to visualize the writing in the various pages of the Crew Notebook, covered a good range of techniques used in questioned document examination.
It is important to realize that despite the availability of wonderful digital enhancement technology, the forensic photographer spent many “human” hours in order to achieve the very best results. This was by no means a case of scan, apply software and see the results. Each area of the pages in question was treated individually, sharpening contrast in some places and reducing background glare in others.
The results obtained way surpassed expectations and the contents that they revealed made every bit of effort well worthwhile.
With the conclusion of examination of the Crew Notebook, it was transferred to the Paper Conservation Laboratory of the Israel Museum. Although work has just started on fixing the diary fragments in place, it has been decided to protect the integrity of the pages as much as possible. Therefore only a minimum amount of restoration will actually be done even though it is within their capability to restore the Notebook to “look like new”.
The pages of the diary and the Crew Notebook have a story to tell, through the writing contained within and no less by the very fact that they survived the tragic loss of flight STS-107.