Ilan Ramon - a decade of the ferry disaster

Ten years ago, the world stopped when the shuttle carrying Ilan Ramon, along with six other astronauts, failed to land on Earth. About the man, the scientific experiments and the legacy he left behind

By: Oded Avraham

Ten years ago, Ilan Ramon perished with six other astronauts aboard the space shuttle Columbia. Since then, the space world has gone through upheavals, the biggest of which was the end of the expensive shuttle program. It is interesting how a collaboration project, which began, some say, mining in the dark, developed into a diamond in Israel's research crown.
"Soon there will be an Israeli astronaut"

Israel joined the space club in 1998. Our path there was led by the launch of the Ofek 1 experimental satellite, on the Israeli Comet launcher. After that, new horizons, communication satellites and of course space components manufactured in Israel for foreign space missions were launched. In 1995, it was decided that the Prime Minister at the time, Shimon Peres, would ask the Americans for a manned cooperation in space, that is to say - an Israeli astronaut. Since Israel did not have, and still does not have, the ability to launch a man into space, the understanding was that the Americans would provide the place on the shuttle and the training, and we would bring the pilot.

Many thought that there was not much chance of getting a positive answer, since it was a long, expensive project, and the places on the space shuttle were limited. However, after the Peres-Clinton meeting in 1995, Clinton announced at a joint press conference that there would soon be an Israeli astronaut in space as a collaboration with the American space agency. "It was quiet for a long time, and the matter did not progress," recalls Abi Har-Evan, CEO of the Space Agency between 1995-2004, who implemented the project.

In fact, according to Har-Evan, many were unaware of the fateful decision of the American administration, including himself. It was the air force representative who informed him in a phone call that "soon there will be an Israeli astronaut". Har-Evan was helped by his acquaintance with Dan Goldin (Goldin), head of NASA, to formulate a cooperation outline between NASA and Israel's then tiny space agency. Goldin and Har-Evan concluded that the astronaut should take an active part in the mission, and not accompany it as a "duty-free tourist". It was also agreed that the Israeli astronaut would arrive with an Israeli scientific experiment, that is, one initiated by the Israeli Academy and financed by the State of Israel, and of course of great scientific importance.

scientific mission

After the news of the collaboration with NASA reached the Israeli media, 15 formal proposals landed on Har-Evan's desk, as well as additional informal proposals, from civilian pilots, officers and more. Har-Evan interviewed some of them, and finally he also met Ilan Ramon. Although, there was no decision that the Israeli astronaut was required to be a soldier, pilot or officer, but the military background of the two created a common language. "He was modest to the right extent," says Har-Evan, who presented Ramon's candidacy to NASA, and it allowed his participation as the first Israeli astronaut, and the participation of another talented pilot, Yitzhak Mayo, as a backup astronaut.

Israel was required to pay millions of dollars for the long training of the two astronauts and the living costs of the families who joined them in the United States. On top of that, the lack of talented pilots was felt in the Air Force. As a result, Mayo was returned to Israel within a year, and Ramon was in "danger of returning" to active service in the Air Force after two years in the United States.

After the joint statement of the United States and Israel on cooperation in space, a call was issued to academic institutions in Israel requesting proposals for the experiment to be performed by the Israeli astronaut. Har-Evan recalled that one of the experiments proposed testing the effect of microgravity on rats. The idea was to send rats into space, connect them to electrodes, and test the effects of the new environment on the rats' brains with the help of electrodes. But internal considerations at NASA regarding sending live rats into space with electrodes on them, in addition to the opposition of animal rights organizations, prevented the selection of this experiment for space flight. Instead, the Madex experiment was chosen to document dust storms and lightning storms.
Ilan Ramon: The salt of the earth

Ilan Ramon, born in 1954, was born in Ramat Gan and as a child his family moved to Be'er Sheva. He dropped out of his first pilot course due to health problems, but finished the second as an outstanding trainee. Ramon was a talented pilot who even helped receive the first F-16 planes that arrived in Israel in the 1982s. Apart from participating in the Columbia shuttle flight, Ramon is mentioned as the young pilot who overpowered the Tammuz nuclear reactor in Iraq in 2009. Ramon also assisted in the development of the Israeli fighter jet, commanded various squadrons, and was quickly promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Air Force. Following the Columbia ferry disaster, Ramon left behind his wife Rona and their four children. In XNUMX, his son Assaf perished in a training flight in the south of Mount Hebron.

The space shuttle Columbia was named after the first American ship to orbit the Earth, and it seems fitting that the first operational space shuttle to orbit the Earth should also be named that. In addition, the shuttle received the nickname OV-102 (Orbiting Vehicle 102, the experimental shuttle Enterprise was called OV-101). The Columbia ferry was built between 1972 and 1979. The first test flight of Columbia, and of the shuttle program in general, took place in 1980.

Since then, the shuttle has participated in 27 additional missions, transported 160 astronauts into space, deployed eight satellites, including the Chandra space telescope that operates in the field of X-ray radiation. In addition, Columbia participated in the third repair mission of the Hubble Space Telescope, circling the Earth a total of 4,808 times. Columbia was similar to the other space shuttles, except for minor differences that resulted from its earlier design. Columbia was not the first shuttle that did not return - the Challenger shuttle disintegrated on its way to space in 1986.

The STS-107 mission was Columbia's last mission. Seven astronauts participated in this mission: Rick Husband, the mission commander; William McCool, pilot; Michael Anderson, mission specialist and payload specialist; David Brown, mission specialist; Kalpana Chawla, flight engineer and mission specialist; Laurel Clark, mission specialist; and Ilan Ramon as a cargo expert. The space laboratory module SPACEHAB was installed in the belly of the shuttle, where experiments by about 70 scientists and research teams from around the world awaited.

The mission's launch date was postponed 13 times over two years, for three main reasons: the replacement of the shuttle's cargo before the flight, an unexpected prolongation of the shuttle's maintenance operations between launches, and cracks that were discovered in the shuttle's fuel system pipes a month before the launch - which was planned for July 2002. Finally STS- 107 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on January 16, 2003. During the STS-16 crew's 107 days in space, the flight went smoothly, with the exception of a few common minor glitches unrelated to the tragedy that followed.

"The shuttle won't survive the return trip"

One incident clouded the assignment's smooth score sheet. 81.9 seconds after the launch the thing happened that would later lead to the loss of the shuttle. A piece of insulating sponge broke off from the strut that connects the external fuel tank to the shuttle body. The piece of sponge hit the left wing of the shuttle at a speed of 800 km per hour. The event was captured by the security cameras, and came up in the analysis performed the day after the launch (an analysis was also performed two hours after the launch, but the higher resolution information required a lot of processing time). In the pictures it is clearly seen that the piece of sponge hits the wing of the shuttle with force and crashes completely.

Indeed, the question arose as to the effect this impact would have on the shuttle's re-entry into the atmosphere. Towards the end of a shuttle mission, it enters the atmosphere at a speed of about 30 thousand km/h. At such a speed, the surrounding atmosphere heats up to 1,500 degrees. The shuttle is wrapped in tiles that are supposed to protect it from the heat. Although, it was known that the integrity of the tiles is essential for the protection of the shuttle, small cracks and breaks in ceramic tiles were detected after successful landings of the space shuttles, also in past Columbia missions - so damage to the ceramic tiles was not an automatic reason for canceling the mission. It was necessary to quantify the damage.

Quantifying the damage caused to the shuttle wing due to the vulnerability of the piece of insulating sponge proved to be a difficult task. The ground crew did bring the damage to the wing to the attention of the astronauts, but the location of the tiles in relation to the shuttle windows prevented a visual inspection by the astronauts themselves. In addition, a robotic arm with cameras, capable of photographing the outside of the shuttle, was not installed this time because the nature of the mission did not require it. A movement towards the space station, where there were astronauts who could take pictures of the damage and send the pictures to NASA engineers on Earth, was not planned and therefore did not take place.

NASA's requests for space photographs of the shuttle by classified installations and satellites that were in the possession of the United States military were lost in the tangles of bureaucracy and were finally answered in the negative - so that the senior NASA engineers were left to rely on quantifying the damage to the wing on a mathematical modeling tool called Crater, which was not at all designed to model impacts This type. After the modeling in the Crater, NASA engineers conducted several simulations to identify structural damage that could be caused to the passages during entry into the atmosphere, but it was impossible to derive from them an operational decision to cancel the mission. The engineers' main report to the managerial level at NASA lacked data, and the entire discussion of the incident was conducted in a compartmentalized manner that prevented those with an opinion that might be of value from helping. The investigation report criticized the conduct of the administrative level which included ignoring the opinion of one engineer who claimed that the ferry would not survive the return journey.

On February 1 (Israel time), the astronauts were given the signal to turn on the shuttle's engines to leave orbit and return to Earth. The shuttle began to slow down from a speed of 29,000 km/h in preparation for its entry into the atmosphere. At this point, the space shuttle had no way back, and had to complete its landing on Earth in one attempt. After about ten minutes, the temperature in the left wing reached 1,577 degrees Celsius. To observers on the ground, the space shuttle appeared as a point of light, and suddenly its brightness intensified greatly. It was the hot air molecules, suddenly heated up, not from an aerodynamic shuttle body but from several fragments moving at a speed of Mach 22.5. Observers on the ground saw wreckage of a ferry leaving a white trail in the sky. At this point the shuttle froze on the radar screens.
Madex experiment

The Israeli Medex experiment (Mediterranean Israeli Dust Experiment) was designed to investigate dust transport processes and its effects on the radiation balance in the Mediterranean Basin (and following the postponement of the shuttle launch, also in the Atlantic Ocean). The importance of the experiment lay in the hypothesis that the movement of aerosols in general, and desert dust in particular, has a great influence on weather changes and the prediction of the future climate.

But at that time, according to Prof. Yoav Yair, who was then a young doctor in the field of atmospheric sciences and the liaison between NASA and the Israeli scientific team, "dust storms were a factor of great uncertainty in atmospheric research", that is, knowledge about their mechanisms was scarce. Therefore, when Tel Aviv University proposed the experiment to the Israeli Space Agency, which forwarded the proposal to NASA, it was accepted almost immediately. The Madex experiment was designed to allow observations from space of dust movements on Earth at several wavelengths. This means that it was possible to record a dust storm in several ways, at the same time, and hence to understand more about the mechanisms operating in it. Such a detailed observation in real time will help alleviate a little the lack of knowledge regarding dust movements on Earth.

Why was it impossible to rely on satellites that existed at that time, towards the end of the nineties? The two NASA satellites that observed dust storms at the time were MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer) and TOMS (Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer). MODIS observed visible light, and TOMS observed ultraviolet, but the two satellites orbited the Earth at different angles, at different speeds, and at different altitudes. It was very difficult to combine their data to study a dust storm in detail, what's more, the observation time from a satellite is relatively short.

In the Madex experiment, the scientists used a single camera, whose technical data, its viewing angle, exposure duration, optical calibration and of course its speed, height above the ground and other data - were known and uniform. In addition, the camera had a wheel with five filters that were changed at a speed of five revolutions per second, so that a given dust storm could be photographed at several wavelengths simultaneously, the images calibrated, and well analyzed.

On top of that, a research plane was placed in the high school. The plan was that if there was a forecast for a dust storm, the plane would move in its direction, and conduct another study that would be combined with the data from space. A group led by Prof. Pinchas Alpert from Tel Aviv University developed a special model for predicting the movement of dust storms. The camera is placed in the luggage compartment of the shuttle, inside a special facility. After the shuttle arrived in space, the trunk was opened, and Ilan Ramon controlled the camera from inside the shuttle using a laptop computer. The recorded data was transmitted to Earth daily.

After the device was mounted on the shuttle, flown and exposed to space, the Israeli research team, headed by the late Prof. Yehoyachin Yosef, stayed in the control room at the Goddard Space Center, Maryland, United States, and waited for a dust storm. Prof. Yair remembers the fear he faced in the team while waiting for the storm. The launch of the ferry was postponed as mentioned until the end of January, while the months in which frequent dust storms occur in the Mediterranean region are

March-June and September-November, so that in the first ten days out of the 16 days of the mission no dust storms were observed in the Mediterranean Sea or the Atlantic Ocean. It was feared that there would not be a single dust storm during the entire mission. The tension dissipated on January 26, on the shuttle's 160th lap. Then came Ramon's words to the ground control aimed at Prof. Yoyachin Yosef: "Tell Yoya I got the dust".
Catch lightning storms

In addition to documenting dust storms, the Madex camera was used to document lightning storms. Here, says Prof. Yair, there was success from the first moment. About 1,500 lightning storms occur on Earth every day, a fact that makes it easy to document them from space. The goal was to activate the camera when the shuttle passes by the dark side of the Earth. Prof. Yair, with his colleague Dr. Baruch Ziv from the Open University, would provide a daily forecast of lightning storms to the astronauts, and they would try to photograph them.

These predictions were written in the style "On Tuesday at 12, when you pass over Samoa, there will be a lightning storm 300 km from the island to your right. You can take a picture of it in just three minutes." Prof. Yair recalled in Ramon's stories how much the astronauts enjoy this part of the mission. Capturing lightning using a video camera manually directed from a laptop computer required the astronaut to be aware of what was below and to the sides of him at all times. This reminded them, Ramon said, of exciting air battles; Six of the seven crew members were experienced pilots.

The Madex experiment produced 14 scientific articles and 45 lectures at conferences in Israel and abroad. On top of that, the lightning experiment was recreated almost entirely by a Japanese astronaut on the space station in 2012, and other countries have incorporated various elements of the Madex experiment into exploration missions from space. The Madex experiment had a very high added value: bringing the Israeli system in general, and the Israeli academy in particular, to the heart of the American shuttle program.

And yet: until the Madex experiment, if a scientific team from the ground wanted to send a command to an astronaut, for example to point a camera in a certain direction, they had to notify the mission manager up to 24 hours in advance. With the Israeli need to document dynamic lightning storms, this period of time was reduced to only six hours, which became the precedent used by current space missions. Prof. Yair points out that there was a need for a human astronaut who could see the dynamic lightning storms with his own eyes and correct the direction of the camera according to his understanding. Yoav Prof. Yair remembers the sharp transition of NASA personnel, as well as himself, from 16 days of euphoria in space to the systemic shock of an organization trying to understand how the shuttle broke up.
It could have been so wonderful

It is impossible to underestimate the depth of the tragedy of NASA and the families of the astronauts, including the Israeli Ramon family. After his return to Israel, Ramon was supposed to help educate the children of Israel in the love of science and their proximity to the fields of technology. Today, two main bodies bearing his name, the private Ramon Foundation and the governmental Ramon Foundation, operate to achieve the goal of educating Israeli children in science. The foundations finance the construction of study centers in the field of space, hold national competitions, organize conferences and seminars, and more. Every year the Ilan Ramon Israeli Space Conference is held by the Fisher Institute for Strategic Air and Space Research, and the Ministry of Science, in collaboration with the Israel Space Agency.

In Prof. Yair's opinion, if the flight had ended as planned, we would have seen another Israeli astronaut (and maybe more) and extensive scientific cooperation with the American Space Agency. "Actually," recalls Prof. Yair, "on the last day of the mission, NASA representatives sat down with the scientific team and discussed the possibility of placing the Madex camera on the International Space Station permanently. After the disaster, the space agency gathered within itself, the scale of priorities changed, and the possibility of this type of cooperation was cut off."