[3][4] He is past president of Commission 22 of the International Astronomical Union (2012–2015) and was chair of the Working Group on Meteor Shower Nomenclature (2006–2012) after it was first established.

Since 2003, Jenniskens identified the Quadrantids parent body 2003 EH1, and several others, as new examples of how fragmenting comets are the dominant source of meteor showers.

[15] The beautiful reentry of JAXA's Hayabusa probe over Australia on 13 June 2010 also included the disintegrating main spacecraft.

More recently, Jenniskens led a mission to study the destructive entry of ESA's Automated Transfer Vehicle Jules Verne on 29 September 2008,[17] Orbital ATK's Cygnus OA6 reentry on 22 June 2016,[18] and the spectacular daytime re-entry of space debris object WT1190F near Sri-Lanka to practice a future observation of an impacting asteroid.

Working with Oliver Moses of the Okavango Research Institute of the University of Maun, Jenniskens triangulated the fall from video records to an area in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve.

Moses and Jenniskens then joined Alexander Proyer of BUIST and Mohutsiwa Gabadirwe of the Botswana Geoscience Institute in a search expedition, which led to the recovery of an 18 gram fragment on June 23, 2018.

These were the first CM chondrites to be recovered from near the surface of the original parent body before it broke up, creating the asteroid family.

Meteorites found shortly after the fall by Chelyabinsk State University colleagues were analyzed and the results from this consortium study were published inScience.

[26] In earlier collaborations, he discovered that an unusual viscous form of liquid water can be a common form of amorphous ice in comets and icy satellites (during a post-doc study with David F. Blake) [27] and he created the first broad detection-limited survey of Diffuse Interstellar Bands in his PhD thesis work with Xavier Désert.