Peter Jenniskens

Petrus Matheus Marie (Peter) Jenniskens (born 1962 in Meterik) is a Dutch-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, and wrote the book Meteor Showers and their Parent Comets, published in 2006 and Atlas of Earth’s Meteor Showers, published in 2023. He is past 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. 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.

Since October 2010, Jenniskens has developed the global Cameras for All-Sky Meteor Surveillance (CAMS) project to map our meteor showers. Meteor showers are detected by triangulating the path of meteors recorded in a low-light video camera surveillance of the night sky displayed at meteorshowers.seti.org.

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.

Jenniskens identified several important mechanisms of how our meteor showers originate. Since 2003, Jenniskens identified the Quadrantids parent body 2003 EH1, and several others, as new examples of how fragmenting comets are the dominant source of meteor showers. These objects are now recognized as the main source of our zodiacal dust cloud. Before that, he predicted and observed the 1995 Alpha Monocerotids meteor outburst (with members of the Dutch Meteor Society), proving that "stars fell like rain at midnight" because the dust trails of long-period comets wander on occasion in Earth's path.

His research also includes artificial meteors. Jenniskens is the principal investigator of NASA's Genesis and Stardust Entry Observing Campaigns to study the fiery return from interplanetary space of the Genesis (September 2004), Stardust (January 2006), and Hayabusa (June 2010) sample return capsules. The beautiful reentry of JAXA's Hayabusa probe over Australia on 13 June 2010 also included the disintegrating main spacecraft. These airborne missions studied what physical conditions the protective heat shield endured during the reentry before being recovered.

More recently, Jenniskens led a mission to study the destructive entry of ESA's Automated Transfer Vehicle Jules Verne on 29 September 2008, Orbital ATK's Cygnus OA6 reentry on 22 June 2016, and the spectacular daytime re-entry of space debris object WT1190F near Sri-Lanka to practice a future observation of an impacting asteroid.