Ilan Ramon was Israel's first astronaut. Ramon was the space shuttle payload specialist on board the fatal STS-107 mission of Space Shuttle Columbia, in which he and the six other crew members were killed in a re-entry accident over the southern United States. Ramon had been selected as a payload specialist in 1997 and trained at the Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas, from 1998 until 2003. Among other experiments, Ramon was responsible for the [[MEIDEX]] project in which he was required to take pictures of atmospheric [[aerosol]] (dust) in the Mediterranean area using a [[multispectral]] camera designed to provide scientific information about atmospheric aerosols and the influence of global [[climate change|changes on the climate]], and data for the [[Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer]] (TOMS) and [[Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer]] (MODIS) instruments. Researchers from [[Tel Aviv University]] (TAU) were responsible for the scientific aspect of the experiment. The TAU team also worked with a US company, [[Orbital Sciences Corporation]], to construct and test special flight instruments for the project.