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January 19, 2003
EASTHAM, Mass. -- A century after Guglielmo Marconi ushered in the era of wireless communications, his daughter marked the centennial Saturday by greeting astronauts from close to the same spot where her father sent a historic radio transmission across the Atlantic.
"In this same spirit of his achievement, and also from Cape Cod, I send this wireless greeting to you in space. Cordial greetings, and good wishes," Princess Elettra Marconi told Kenneth Bowersox, commander of the international space station.
The site is about 5 miles from the coastal bluff where Marconi sent the first wireless trans-Atlantic message: a Morse code greeting from President Theodore Roosevelt to King Edward VII of England on Jan. 18, 1903.
ASTRONAUTS BEGIN WEATHER EXPERIMENT: Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli in space, said Saturday he was too busy with science experiments aboard shuttle Columbia to observe the Jewish Sabbath.
Ramon, though, noted that he is secular. He and his crewmates aimed a pair of Israeli cameras at the Mediterranean and Atlantic in search of airborne plumes of dust that might affect the weather. The $2-million experiment is sponsored by the Israel Space Agency and Tel Aviv University.
Researchers want to better understand how dust affects climate and are using the 16-day mission to gather evidence.