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5 unusual facts about John Zarnecki


17920 Zarnecki

Named after Professor John Zarnecki (b. 1949), of the Open University, Milton Keynes, who has developed spacecraft instrumentation to study the surfaces and atmospheres of planets, satellites and small bodies.

John Zarnecki

In 1961, the school gave its pupils a day off to witness the first person in space, Yuri Gagarin, visiting the tomb of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery nearby.

In 1981, he moved to the University of Kent in Canterbury and became the project manager for the Dust Impact Detection System on board the Giotto probe that visited Halley's Comet.

On 15 October 1997, Cassini-Huygens was successfully launched from Cape Canaveral.

Since 2000, he has worked at the Open University, having previously been a professor and researcher at the University of Kent.



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