International recognition
The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has announced the recipients of its 2025 PhD Prizes, which each year recognize the most outstanding doctoral research carried out worldwide. Through these awards, the IAU highlights the importance of supporting early-career researchers and celebrates the scientific excellence, commitment, and perseverance required to advance our understanding of the Universe.
Among the 22 researchers honoured this year, Antonin Wargnier received an Honourable Mention from Division F, "Planetary Systems and Bioastronomy", for his PhD thesis carried out at LIRA and Sorbonne University. The selection committee praised the comprehensive nature of his research, which successfully combines instrumental expertise, laboratory experiments and modelling, while establishing a strong connection between laboratory measurements and space-based observations.
All awardees will be invited to present their work during the "Division Days" of the XXXIII IAU General Assembly, to be held in Rome, Italy, from 10 to 19 August 2027.
Antonin Wargnier’s research
Entitled "Spectrophotometric Properties of the Surfaces of Phobos and Deimos : Preparation for the Exploration Mission to the Martian Moons", Antonin Wargnier’s PhD thesis has made a major contribution to our understanding of Mars’ two natural satellites. In particular, his work demonstrated the common origin of Phobos and Deimos through the analysis of data from the SRC instrument aboard the Mars Express mission (orbiting Mars since December 2003), for which he carried out the first complete recalibration in more than twenty years.
He also developed a regolith simulator, named OPPS, designed to prepare the interpretation of future observations from JAXA’s MMX (Martian Moons eXploration) mission, where he is now a postdoctoral researcher.
"This international distinction highlights the excellence of the planetary exploration research conducted at Observatoire de Paris – PSL. It comes at a particularly exciting time, as the MMX mission, to which our scientists from the Laboratory for Instrumentation and Research in Astrophysics (LIRA) contribute, is entering its decisive phase, with a launch scheduled for the end of the year from the Tanegashima Space Center. I warmly congratulate Antonin Wargnier on this recognition, which crowns exemplary work serving the space science of tomorrow," said Philippe Stée, President of Observatoire de Paris – PSL.
