He
finished his secondary education in 1956, and graduated with the
cand.real. degree in 1963, having studied in both
Bergen and
Oslo. From 1964 to 1965 he was a research assistant at
Harestua. He then worked in the United States for several years, and took the
Ph.D. at
Yale University in 1969. His doctor's thesis is today a standard work within estimating the course of
planets,
moons,
meteors,
comets and artificial sounds. His work is among other things used by
NASA's
Voyager sounds to
Jupiter, and he received the
NASA Group Achievement Award for his work. After several years at the
Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian in
Cambridge, Massachusetts he returned from the United States to Norway in 1978, where he was employed at the
Norwegian Defence Research Establishment from 1978 to 1988. He was also an assisting professor at the
University of Tromsø from 1980. In 1988 he was appointed as a professor at the University of Oslo. From 1993 he was also responsible for the official Norwegian
almanac. He is a member of the
Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters since 1991. Since 1990 he presides over the
International Astronomical Union Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature, which maintains the
astronomical naming conventions and
planetary nomenclature for planetary bodies. Already in 1978, the asteroid
2067 Aksnes was named after Aksnes. In 2006 he received the
HM The King's Medal of Merit in gold. He died in February 2026 in Bærum. ==References==