Claudia Alexander, NASA Manager Who Led Jupiter Mission, Dies at 56

 

Photo Credit Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times

 
 Claudia Alexander had a pioneering role in the Galileo mission and was NASA’s scientist on the international Rosetta project.  

The New York Times

 By SAM ROBERTS

JULY 19, 2015

 

Claudia Alexander, who played a pioneering role in NASA’s Galileo mission to Jupiter and the international Rosetta space-exploration project, died on July 11 in Arcadia, Calif. She was 56.

The cause was breast cancer, her sister, Suzanne Alexander, said.

Dr. Alexander was a rarity at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for two reasons: She was a woman, and she was black. She was also considered a brilliant scientist.

She joined the Jet Propulsion Laboratory after getting her doctorate and was the last project manager of the 14-year, $1.5 billion Galileo mission, which ended in 2003, and the project scientist for NASA on the European Space Agency’s Rosetta project, which launched more than a decade ago. She was responsible for $35 million in instruments to collect data on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, including its temperature.

Dr. Alexander’s areas of expertise included the evolution and physics of comets, Jupiter and its moons, Venus, plate tectonics and the stream of particles from the sun known as solar wind. She wrote or co-wrote more than a dozen scientific papers, several children’s books (including titles in the “Windows to Adventure” series, “Which of the Mountains Is Greatest of All?” and “Windows to the Morning Star”) and, for fun, science fiction.

Claudia Joan Alexander was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, on May 30, 1959, and raised in Santa Clara, Calif., during the birth of the computer revolution in the Silicon Valley. Her father, Harold, was a social worker. Her mother, the former Gaynelle Williams, was a librarian who worked for Gordon Moore, who became a co-founder of Intel.

In addition to her sister, she is survived by her brother, David.

“At the age of 5 or 6, the film ‘Fantasia’ opened an imaginative pathway of wonder for me about worlds other than Earth — primitive worlds — and how huge geological forces can impact life-forms there,” Dr. Alexander recalled in an interview with a University of Michigan alumni magazine. She also remembered watching Carl Sagan’s television series “Cosmos” a dozen or more times.

She hoped to enroll at the University of California, Berkeley, to study journalism, but her parents would pay only if she majored in “something ‘useful’ like engineering,” she said. She hated it.

She said in another interview, “I found it was a lot more fun to think about the flow of water in a river than water in the city sewer, so I switched to earth science.” But she had already gravitated toward planetary science, and a mentorship with the astronomer Ray T. Reynolds, during a high school summer internship with NASA.

Her favorite college memory, she said, was “staying up all night with friends arguing about which one of us was going to do the most for mankind with the research we were doing.”

She graduated from Berkeley and went on to earn a master’s degree at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a doctorate from the University of Michigan.

Dr. Alexander was so inspired by Johannes Kepler’s research into circular orbits, what she called a lifelong dedication to “searching out a fundamental truth,” that she was thrilled even to be proved wrong when the discovery of a thin atmosphere on Jupiter’s moon Ganymede upended assumptions that it was frozen solid.

“It was an exciting moment to experience something that changed my whole way of thinking,” she recalled. “I’ve never been so happy to be wrong before.”

She was 40 when she joined the Rosetta project. Rosetta’s lander reached the comet last November.

“They said they wanted someone who was young enough who would still be around when Rosetta gets there 10 years from now,” she explained in an interview with US Black Engineer and Information Technology magazine. “And they said they chose me deliberately for my ability to get along with different cultures.”

In an interview last year with The Los Angeles Times, she recalled that as a black woman in a field dominated by white men, “I’m used to walking between two different cultures.”

“For me,” she added, “this is among the purposes of my life — to take us from states of ignorance to states of understanding with bold exploration that you can’t do every day.”

In an interview with Michigan Engineer magazine, she reminded young people that “loving your work can sometimes be as important as how much money you make.”

She also compared a scientist’s effect on society with that of other careers.

“In the annals of history,” she said, “the athletes and musicians fade, but the ones who make fundamental improvements in humankind’s way of life, and in their understanding of the universe, live on in their discoveries.”