Jan Charles "John" Zarnecki, FRAS FInstP (born 6 November 1949[1] in Finchley, Middlesex, England) is an English space science professor and researcher.

[3] Born and raised in Finchley, Middlesex, the son of the art historian George Zarnecki,[1] 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.

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.

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 2005, Zarnecki won the Sir Arthur Clarke Award for individual achievement, for his work on the Huygens probe.

[5] In 2006, Asteroid 17920 was named Zarnecki by the International Astronomical Union, in recognition of “..spacecraft instrumentation to study the surfaces and atmospheres of planets, satellites and small bodies".