In the course of his career, Zarnecki has worked on hardware for many space missions. 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 1988, Zarnecki was involved in plans to provide instrumentation for a proposed asteroid mission called Vesta, but, when this was dropped in favour of the
Cassini–Huygens mission to
Saturn and its moons, he and his team decided to use their expertise to design the
Surface Science Package (SSP) for the
Huygens probe. The probe would be released from the main spacecraft (Cassini) and descend to the surface of Saturn's largest moon
Titan. The proposal was successful and, in 1990, Zarnecki was appointed as the SSP's Principal Investigator. The next seven years were spent assembling and testing the instrument. With only 70% of necessary funds available, Zarnecki had to be creative with the resources he was assigned. He managed to persuade a group of scientists in
Poland to provide part of the instrumentation for free. One major setback came during the final stages of testing when, on 14 January 1996, the package was put through its final vibration test and its casing cracked. After some extensive redesign, the package was delivered to the
European Space Agency (ESA). On 15 October 1997, Cassini-Huygens was successfully launched from
Cape Canaveral. In 2000, Zarnecki, along with the rest of the SSP team, moved to the Open University in
Milton Keynes. There he became involved in the ill-fated
Beagle 2 mission to
Mars, lost while landing in December 2003. On 25 December 2004, the Huygens probe separated successfully from Cassini and twenty-two days later, on 14 January 2005, it landed successfully on the surface of Titan. The SSP collected over three and a half hours of data, which, thanks to its efficient encoding, could be stored on a single
floppy disk. The
BBC Four television documentary
Destination Titan, first broadcast in April 2011, focused on Zarnecki and the Huygens mission from the perspective of the mission scientists. Between 2007 and 2009, Zarnecki was the Directory of the Centre for Earth, Planetary, Space & Astronomical Research (CEPSAR) at the Open University. He is currently working as the team leader on the
ExoMars mission, Europe's first
Mars rover mission. He is also co-investigator on the PTOLEMY instrument for the
Rosetta mission to comet
67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. ==Honours and appointments==