Scientist Interview - Peter Jenniskens

Peter Jenniskens, Senior Research Scientist at the Carl Sagan Center of the SETI Institute, is best known for his recovery of fragments of asteroid 2008 TC3 in the Nubian Desert of northern Sudan with Sudanese astronomer Muawia Shaddad and his students from the University of Khartoum. This was the first time that an asteroid was spotted in space, observed by telescopes, then samples retrieved for study.

Peter participated in 2014 in a field study of the Chelyanbinsk airburst in Russia.

Peter currently runs the NASA sponsored Cameras for Allsky Meteor Surveillance (CAMS) (http://cams.seti.org) project in northern California, which aims to confirm some of the 300+ meteor showers in the IAU Working List that need confirmation. Sixty video security cameras film the skies over the San Francisco Bay Area.

The next big meteor shower may occur on May 24th, 2014, in the hours around 7:40 UT (00:40 PDT, 03:40 EDT), according to predictions by Peter Jenniskens and Esko Lyytinen published in Peter's tome on Meteor Showers and their Parent Bodies in 2006.

Meteor Shower page at http://meteor.seti.org

Additional Information

Meteor Astronomer Peter Jenniskens Participates in Chelyabinsk Meteor Impact Investigation (Press release)

An interview with SETI Institute Meteor Astronomer Peter Jenniskens about the publication of his paper in Science magazine on the Chelyabinsk meteor impact in Feb. 2013

Jenniskens talk on visiting Russia to learn more about Chelyabinsk meteor impact