Israel's first astronaut - Air Force Col. Ilan Ramon and the NASA space shuttle Columbia mission launched successfully this afternoon at 17:39 Israel time. The countdown was watched by households all over Israel. Within three hours, the Columbia staff will begin carrying out their tasks.
STS-107 is a multi-discipline microgravity and Earth science research mission with a multitude of international scientific investigations to be conducted continuously during the planned 16 days in orbit.
"Personally I think it's very peculiar to be the first Israeli up in space", Ilan Ramon was quoted as saying in a pre-flight interview. "Especially because of my background, which is kind of a symbol of a lot of other Israelis' background. My mother is a Holocaust survivor. She was in Auschwitz. My father fought for the independence of Israel, not so long ago. I was born in Israel and I'm kind of the proof for them, and for the whole Israeli people, that whatever we fought for and we've been going through in the last century (or maybe in the last two thousand years), is coming true."
Ramon, a former F-16 squadron commander and chief of weapons-system development and acquisition for the Israeli air force, has been training at the Space Center in Houston, representing the Israel Space Agency (ISA), since 1998. His role this time, however, is purely scientific. His main responsibility in space will be to use a multispectral camera to track dust particles from the sandstorms that blow from the Sahara over the Mediterranean and Middle East. The study - the Mediterranean Israeli Dust Experiment, designed at Tel Aviv University - is intended to provide information on how dust affects rainfall.
On December 11, 1995, US President Bill Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres announced that they had agreed "to proceed with space-based experiments in sustainable water use and environmental protection" and that, as a part of this effort, the United States "will also train Israeli astronauts to participate in these programs." It was also decided that the astronaut would be a payload specialist for an Israeli scientific experiment to be decided by the Israeli Space Agency (ISA) with the approval of NASA.
The ISA-developed cooperative payload, entitled Mediterranean Israeli Dust Experiment (MEIDEX), will contain ultraviolet, visible, and near infrared array-detector cameras and will be launched aboard the shuttle to obtain calibrated images of desert and transported pollution aerosols over land and sea. The experiment will provide sound scientific information about atmospheric aerosols, as well as complementary data for NASA's Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) and Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectro-radiometer (MODIS) instruments.
The Israel Space Agency, established in 1982, is a coordinating body, using consultants and subcontractors for devising and implementing its policy and programs.
The Israel Space Agency and the Israeli industry and academia are involved in different stages of research, development or operations of a series of space and satellite programs, among the most well-known the Ofeq and Amos satellites.
Click here for more information about Col. Ilan Ramon and the Israeli Space Program.
Published by Globes [online] - www.globes.co.il - on 16 January 2003