President of the Royal Astronomical Society and Emeritus professor at the U.K.’s Open University. He has over 30 years of experience of world-leading space research, including developing instrumentation for the Hubble Space Telescope, the Giotto mission that flew past Halley’s comet in 1985, and the Cassini/Huygens mission to the Saturnian system. For the Huygens probe, he led the team that provided one of the scientific instruments that landed on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. He has also served as Vice-President of the Royal Astronomical Society. Asteroid 17920 was officially named after him in recognition of his contribution to space research.