Yigal Zalmona, a curator at the Israel Museum, displays pages from the diary of Ilan Ramon, an Israeli astronaut who died on the Space Shuttle Columbia. (Rachael Strecher/Associated Press)

Pages from a diary that mysteriously floated down to earth went on display at a museum in Israel on Sunday.

The diary holds the words of Ilan Ramon, Israel's first astronaut, who was killed along with six other astronauts when Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated upon re-entering the atmosphere in February 2003.

The book survived temperatures of more than 1,000 degrees Celsius as Columbia tore apart as it re-entered earth's atmosphere

The 37 pages found fell 60 kilometres to the ground, landing in Palestine, Tex., named after the biblical region of Palestine.

Now, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, best known for preserving and restoring the Dead Sea Scrolls, has pieced it back together.

Curator Yigal Zalmona says it's amazing the pages survived at all

"I'm a rational person, but this is something that touches on a miracle," he told CBC News.

In his diary, Ramon describes life aboard the doomed space shuttle.

"Today is the first day that I am truly living in space. I have become a man who lives and works in space," he wrote during the 16-day mission.

Ramon described the feeling of waking in the morning and floating weightless.

He also wrote out the Kiddush prayer, a blessing over wine Jews recite on the Sabbath.

The pages, donated by Ramon's family, are now part of an exhibition of Israeli and Jewish documents

The museum's director, James Snyder, says the different texts connect thousands of years of Jewish history with the modern Israeli state.

"Nothing signals its most contemporary moment more than the diary of an Israeli astronaut who reached the farthest reaches of cosmic outer space," he said.

Restoring the pages was painstaking work, Snyder said.

"It took about one year to restore the diary, and another four to decipher the text," he said.

Also on display, blood-stained lyrics to Song of Peace, on a page which Yitzhak Rabin was holding minutes before he was assassinated.

With files from Peter Armstrong