Claudia Alexander died of breast cancer at age 56 in Los Angeles while serving as project scientist for NASA's contribution to ESA's Rosetta comet mission.
Claudia Joan Alexander died on July 11, 2015, in Los Angeles, California, after a battle with breast cancer. She was 56 years old at the time of her death.
At the time she passed, Alexander was actively serving as the project scientist for NASA's contribution to the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission, which was in the midst of its historic rendezvous with comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. Rosetta had made history the previous year by becoming the first spacecraft to orbit a comet and deploy a lander (Philae) onto a cometary surface, and Alexander had played a crucial scientific leadership role in the American side of this international collaboration.
Her death came as a profound loss to the planetary science community. Colleagues and institutions, including NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, publicly mourned her passing and celebrated her decades of contributions to space exploration, particularly her leadership on the Galileo mission to Jupiter and her scientific stewardship of Rosetta.
Alexander's death highlighted the continuing importance of recognizing the contributions of Black women in STEM fields, as tributes emphasized both her scientific achievements and her role as a trailblazer who had overcome significant barriers in a field where she was frequently one of the only women, and often the only Black woman, in the room.