John C. Zarnecki (born November 6, 1949, Finchley) is an English Sir Arthur Clarke Award winning professor and researcher in space science. Currently working at the Open University since 2000, he was previously a professor and researcher at the University of Kent. He has taken part in several high profile space probe missions and is an expert on space debris, space dust and impacts.
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Born and raised in Finchley, Middlesex, he was educated at Highgate School. John was interested in space exploration from an early age. This was partly inspired by a 1961 visit of first man in space Yuri Gagarin to Highgate cemetery. Gagarin had come to see the tomb of Karl Marx, and John's nearby school gave all the children a day off to go and see the famous cosmonaut.[1]
John graduated from Cambridge University with a physics degree, and went on to study for his PhD at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory in Surrey.
In the course of his career John Zarnecki has worked on hardware for many space missions. Originally working for British Aerospace, he was part of the team that developed the Faint Object Camera for the Hubble Space Telescope. In 1981 he moved to the University of Kent and became the project manager on the Dust Impact Detection System which was part of the Giotto mission to Halley's Comet.
In 1988 Zarnecki was involved in plans to provide instrumentation for a proposed asteroid mission called Vesta, but when this was dropped in favour of the Cassini–Huygens mission to Saturn and its moons, Zarnecki and his team from Canterbury decided to use their expertise from the Vesta proposal to design the Surface-Science Package for the Huygens probe, which would aim to descend to the surface of Saturn's largest moon Titan. The proposal was successful, and in 1990 he was appointed as Principal Investigator for the instrument.
The next seven years were spent assembling and testing the instrument. With only 70% of necessary funds available, Zarnecki had to be creative with his resources, and managed to persuade a group of scientists in Poland to provide part of the instrument for free.
One major setback came during the final stages of testing. On January 14, 1996 the instrument was put through its final vibration test, and the structure cracked resulting in extensive redesign. Finally the instrument was delivered to ESA, and on October 15, 1997 Cassini-Huygens was successfully launched from Cape Canaveral.
In 2000 Zarnecki moved to the Open University in Milton Keynes, along with his Surface Science Package team. There he became involved in the ill fated Beagle 2 mission to Mars, which was lost on landing in December 2003.
On December 25, 2004, the Huygens probe successfully separated from its Cassini mothership and 22 days later on January 14, 2005 it successfully landed on the surface of Titan. John's 'Surface Science Package' collected over 3.5 hours of data from the distant moon; nevertheless the data could be stored on a single floppy disk. The BBC Four television documentary Destination Titan, broadcast in April 2011, focused on John Zarnecki and the Huygens mission from the perspective of the mission scientists.[2]
For his work on the Huygens probe as a whole, in 2005 John Zarnecki won the Sir Arthur Clarke Award for individual achievement.
Zarnecki was the Directory of the Centre for Earth, Planetary, Space & Astronomical Research (CEPSAR) at the Open University between 2007 and 2009.[3]
He is currently working as the team leader on the ExoMars mission, Europe's first Mars rover mission, and is co-investigator on the PTOLEMY instrument for the Rosetta mission to comet 46P/Wirtanen. Rosetta has also been re-targeted to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
John Zarnecki lives in Milton Keynes, and has a house in the south of France. He is also a passionate supporter of Crystal Palace Football Club.