Named in honour of James Jones (b. 1939-07-03 in Oldham, U.K.), professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, since 1966. Jones became interested in meteors and astronomy while attending graduate school at Sheffield University in the United Kingdom. He completed his Ph.D. in 1966 under Tom Kaiser. Jones pioneered the video observation of meteors, created a large-scale catalogue of video meteor orbits and performed early physical studies, both modeling and observational, on small meteoroids. In the area of radar meteor research, Jones studied the theoretical scattering of radio waves from meteor trails for both backscatter and forward scatter systems, and invented the single-station radar radiant mapping technique. Jones is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Name proposed and citation prepared by Peter Jedicke and Robert Jedicke.

Reference: MPC 45234