Sept. 30--NASA scientist Claudia Alexander has received an honor that's literally out of this world -- her colleagues have named part of a comet after her.
And not just any comet. The one that includes what is now known as the C. Alexander Gate is none other than 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the comet being orbited by the Rosetta spacecraft.
Alexander was NASA's project scientist for the Rosetta mission, based at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge. For 15 years, she oversaw three instruments on the orbiter and acted as NASA's emissary to the European Space Agency, which led the daring mission to land a spacecraft the size of a washing machine on a comet speeding through space at 84,000 miles per hour.
Last November, Alexander joined her European colleagues in Darmstadt, Germany, as Rosetta released its Philae lander for its final descent to 67P. Philae bounced twice before landing in its final resting place.
A mere eight months later, she died of breast cancer at a hospital in Arcadia. She was only 56 years old.
But Alexander was on the minds of her colleagues when they met this month in Goettingen, Germany, to share updates on their studies of 67P and discuss potential new studies.
Members of the Rosetta Science Working Team dedicated a towering, gate-like feature on 67P's smaller lobe to Alexander, who held degrees from UC Berkeley, UCLA and the University of Michigan.
They also named a feature on the comet's larger lobe after Angioletta Coradini, the former principal investigator for Rosetta's visible and infrared thermal imaging spectrometer, or VIRTIS. Coradini passed away in 2011 at the age of 65.
The C. Alexander Gate and the A. Coradini Gate were selected "for their prominence on Comet 67P/C-G, and for their very distinctive and striking gate-like appearances, considered to be highly appropriate monuments for our absent colleagues," Rosetta Project Scientist Matt Taylor of the European Space Agency wrote in a blog post published this week.
Taylor also announced the two dedications at a meeting of the European Planetary Science Congress in Nantes, France.
