Peter Jenniskens
| Peter Jenniskens | |
|---|---|
Peter Jenniskens in the Nubian Desert, February 2009
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| Born |
Petrus Matheus Marie Jenniskens August 2, 1962 Horst, Limburg, Netherlands |
| Residence | Mountain View, California, United States |
| Nationality | Dutch, American |
| Education |
M.S. Leiden University (1988) Ph.D. Leiden University (1992) |
| Occupation |
Astronomer, Explorer SETI Institute NASA Ames Research Center |
Petrus Matheus Marie (Peter) Jenniskens (born 2 August 1962 in Horst) is a Dutch and American astronomer and a senior research scientist at the Carl Sagan Center of the SETI Institute and at NASA Ames Research Center. He is an expert on meteor showers. Jenniskens is the author of the 790 page book "Meteor Showers and their Parent Comets" published by Cambridge University Press in 2006. Jenniskens is president of Commission 22 of the International Astronomical Union (2012-2015) and was chair of the Working Group on Meteor Shower Nomenclature (2006–2012) after it was first established. Discovered at Ondřejov Observatory by Petr Pravec, asteroid "42981 Jenniskens" is named in his honor.
In 2008, Jenniskens together with Muawia Shaddad, led a team from the University of Khartoum in Sudan that recovered fragments of asteroid 2008 TC3 in the Nubian Desert, marking the first time meteorite fragments had been found from an object that was previously tracked in outer space before hitting Earth.
Jenniskens is the principal investigator of NASA's Leonid Multi-Instrument Aircraft Campaign (Leonid MAC), a series of four airborne missions that fielded modern instrumental techniques to study the 1998 - 2002 Leonids meteor storms. These missions helped develop meteor storm prediction models, detected the signature of organic matter in the wake of meteors as a potential precursor to origin-of-life chemistry, and discovered many new aspects of meteor radiation.
More recent meteor shower missions include the Aurigid Multi-Instrument Aircraft Campaign (Aurigid MAC), which studied a rare September 1, 2007, outburst of Aurigids from long-period comet C/1911 N1 (Kiess), and the Quadrantid Multi-Instrument Aircraft Campaign (Quadrantid MAC), which studied the January 3, 2008, Quadrantids.
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