According to reports, NASA scientist Claudia Alexander has died. She was 56. Alexander had worked as a project manager for the Galileo spacecraft mission to Jupiter and also contributed to the European Space Agency's Rosetta comet chaser.

According to NASA, on July 11, Alexander passed away after a battle with breast cancer for 10 years. There was no information regarding where she died.

According to Charles Elachi, director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California, Claudia was having extraordinary skills of working as a space explorer. As per Elachi, "Of course with a doctorate in plasma physics, her technical credentials were solid. But she also had a special understanding of how scientific discovery affects us all, and how our greatest achievements are the result of teamwork, which came easily to her".

Alexander, who was born in Canada, shifted to California's Silicon Valley, at a young age with her family where she was brought up.

In 1986, she started working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory when she joined the team, working on the Galileo spacecraft, three years prior to its launch on a mission for studying Jupiter and the planet's moons.

After some time, she became final project manager of the Galileo mission. She watched over the end of the spacecraft's journey in 2013, when it was put on a collision course to break up in dense atmosphere of the planet. At that time, Alexander said that the mission helped them learn many surprising things.