The UAI has announced the winners of its 2025 Doctoral Prizes, which are awarded annually to recognise the most outstanding research carried out around the world. The international body aims to emphasise the importance of supporting early-career researchers and to highlight the scientific excellence, commitment and perseverance required to advance our understanding of the Universe.
Among the 22 researchers honoured this year, Dr Antonin Wargnier has received an honourable mention from Division F “Planetary Systems and Astrobiology” for his thesis, defended at the Paris Observatory and Sorbonne University.
Entitled "Spectrophotometric properties of the surfaces of Phobos and Deimos : preparation for the mission to explore the Martian moons", this thesis makes a major contribution to our knowledge of Mars’ two moons.
Antonin Wargnier’s work has, in particular, helped to demonstrate the common origin of Phobos and Deimos through the analysis of data from the SRC instrument on the Mars Express mission (which has been orbiting Mars since December 2003), for which he carried out the first full calibration in twenty years.
Antonin Wargnier has also developed a regolith simulator, known as OPPS, designed to prepare for the interpretation of future observations from the MMX (Martian Moons eXploration) mission by JAXA, the Japanese space agency.
The Division F committee commended this highly comprehensive research, which successfully combines instrumental expertise, laboratory experiments and modelling, as well as the close link established between measurements carried out on Earth and space-based observations. Dr Wargnier is currently based in Japan at JAXA.
“This international accolade highlights the excellence of the research carried out at the Paris Observatory – PSL in the field of planetary exploration. It comes at a particularly exciting time, as the MMX mission, to which our scientists at the Laboratory of Instrumentation and Research in Astrophysics are contributing, is about to enter its decisive phase with a launch scheduled for the end of the year from the Tanegashima Space Centre. “I warmly congratulate Antonin Wargnier on this recognition, which crowns his exemplary work in the service of the space science of tomorrow,” said Philippe Stée, President of the Paris Observatory – PSL.
All the winners will be invited to present their work during the ‘Division Days’ at the XXXIIIe General Assembly of the UAI, to be held from 10 to 19 August 2027 in Rome, Italy.