David Clifford Jewitt (born 1958) is a British-American[citation needed] astronomer who studies the Solar System, especially its minor bodies.
[3] His own exploration of outer space began with a tabletop 40 mm refracting telescope that his grandparents gave him as a birthday present.
[3] In 1976, supported by a local authority grant, Jewitt enrolled at University College London to take courses in astronomy, physics, mathematics, computing, electronics, metalwork and technical drawing, studying both at UCL's Gower Street campus and at the UCL Observatory (then called the University of London Observatory) in Mill Hill.
[3] The module that he enjoyed most was a panoramic survey of physics delivered by the Christian, Rolls-Royce-driving space scientist Professor Sir Robert Boyd.
[3] Following the advice of UCL's Professor Michael Dworetsky, Jewitt decided to pursue his postgraduate studies at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
[5] In 2009, Jewitt returned to the American mainland to work at the University of California, Los Angeles, becoming a Member of UCLA's Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics and a professor in what was then its Department of Earth and Space Sciences.
In 1992, after five years of searching, Jewitt and the Vietnamese-American astronomer Jane X. Luu discovered 15760 Albion, the first Kuiper belt object (other than Pluto and its largest moon Charon) to be detected.
[8][9] Since discovering 15760 Albion, Jewitt has identified dozens of other objects in the Kuiper belt in a series of pioneering wide field surveys.
Mathematical models of the formation and evolution of the Solar System have indicated that in order for the Kuiper belt to have developed the structure that has been observed, the Kuiper belt objects and the gas giant planets must have come to their present orbits after migrating to them from elsewhere, pulled away from their earlier paths by their gravitational interactions with one another and with the disc of material that had coalesced around the juvenile Sun.
[10] In 1982, he achieved worldwide fame as the first astronomer to recover Halley's Comet as it approached its 1986 perihelion, detecting it with the Hale telescope using an early CCD.
"[15] In October 1982, Patrick Moore interviewed Jewitt about his recovery of Halley's Comet in a special episode of BBC TV's The Sky at Night.
[16] A quarter of a century later, Horizon returned to Jewitt to interview him for Asteroids: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Season 47, Episode 6).
[17] Jewitt told viewers that he had found it difficult to secure enough telescope time for his trans-Neptunian research, and had only been able to achieve his celebrated breakthrough by looking for Kuiper belt objects on nights when he was supposed to be working on other projects.
[5] In 2012, he was awarded the $1 million Shaw Prize for astronomy, jointly with his former student Jane X. Luu of MIT's Lincoln Laboratury, in recognition of their "discovery and characterization of trans-Neptunian bodies, an archaeological treasure dating back to the formation of the solar system and the long sought source of short period comets".
[3] As a child, Jewitt's extra-astronomical interests included writing, history, music, machines, animals, trees, rocks and fossils.
[3] Among the pleasures of his mature years are the cult British TV series The Prisoner and the music of the twentieth century modernist composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis.