Jan Charles "John" Zarnecki, (born 6 November 1949 in Finchley, Middlesex, England) is an English space science professor and researcher. Since 2013, Zarnecki has been a Director of the International Space Science Institute (Berne, Switzerland). Between 2004 and 2013 he was a Professor of Space Science (now Emeritus) at the Open University, having previously been a professor and researcher at the University of Kent. Zarnecki has taken part in several high-profile space probe missions and is an expert on space debris, space dust and impacts. He was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 2014, and became President of the Royal Astronomical Society in May 2016, having been vice-president from 2009 to 2011 and President-Elect for the year from May 2015. Early life Born and raised in Finchley, Middlesex, the son of the art historian George Zarnecki, he was educated at Highgate School in north London and was interested in space exploration from an early age. 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. Zarnecki was among those who went. Zarnecki graduated with a BA degree in Natural Sciences from Queens' College, Cambridge in 1971 (promoted to MA in 1975). He undertook doctoral research at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory in Surrey and subsequently obtained a PhD degree in Physics and Astronomy from University College London in 1977. Space science In the course of his career, Zarnecki has worked on hardware for many space missions. At first, he worked for British Aerospace and 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 in Canterbury and became the project manager for the Dust Impact Detection System on board the Giotto probe that visited 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, he and his team decided to use their expertise to design the Surface Science Package (SSP) for the Huygens probe. The probe would be released from the main spacecraft (Cassini) and descend to the surface of Saturn's largest moon Titan. The proposal was successful and, in 1990, Zarnecki was appointed as the SSP's