Faith Vilas Receives The Gerard P. Kuiper Prize
Planetary Science Institute Senior Scientist Faith Vilas was awarded the 2025 Gerard P. Kuiper Prize by the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society. This prize recognizes and honors outstanding contributors to planetary science.
“I am completely amazed to be given the Kuiper Prize,” said Vilas, who has been with PSI for 15 years. “It’s fantastic to be honored by the DPS and my colleagues with this award.”
Past recipients include geologist Eugene Shoemaker, who co-discovered comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, and astronomer and science communicator Carl Sagan. University of Arizona Professor Emeritus William Hubbard and Regents Professor Emeritus Donald Hunten have also received this prestigious award.
The DPS commends Vilas’ distinguished career of groundbreaking research and wide-ranging innovations. She has made outstanding contributions to planetary science across a range of diverse topics. She has pioneered remote sensing of the Solar System, pushing capabilities through instrument design and expert observations of a variety of targets. Vilas designed the coronagraph used to acquire the first image of a circumstellar disk around another star and made the first asteroid survey using a CCD spectrograph, an instrument for measuring the intensity of light at different wavelengths. She made pioneering observations of aqueous alteration on primitive asteroids, the mineralogy of Mercury and hydration on the Moon.
The DPS will present Vilas with her award at the 2025 EPSC-DPS meeting, held in Helsinki, Finland on Sept. 11 at 2 p.m., where she will give the keynote speech.
“I’ve been in planetary sciences for 50 years. When I began, humankind’s first space probes were passing planets in our Solar System for the first time,” she said. “Now we study samples of material returned from the surfaces of asteroids to the Earth and determine the compositions of atmospheres of planets around other stars. Our scientific growth has been extraordinary, and I’ll talk about what it has been like to be a part of that when I receive the award.”
Her service to and leadership of the community have been extraordinary, according to the DPS commendation, including her roles as Program Director for Planetary Astronomy at the National Science Foundation; Chief Scientist of the NASA Planetary Data System; inaugural NASA Small Bodies Assessment Group Chair; Chair of the American Astronomical Society Division for Planetary Sciences; NASA Discovery Program Scientist; and Vice-Chair and Chair of the Detection and Characterization Sub-Committee on National Academies’ 2010 study on near-Earth object detection, characterization, mitigation. She was the Director of the Multiple Mirror Telescope, or MMT, observatory from 2005-2010 and has been involved in missions such as MESSENGER – short for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging – at Mercury and Hayabusa at the asteroid Itokawa. Furthermore, she currently serves as the inaugural Editor of the AAS Planetary Science Journal. The impact of exceptional planetary science contributions enabled by Vilas’ work in these areas cannot be overstated.
“I am thrilled that the DPS is awarding Faith Vilas with the Kuiper Prize,” said PSI Director Amanda Hendrix. “In terms of both science and service, she has given so much to the planetary community over the span of her prestigious career. This commendation is so well deserved.”
“Faith is a pioneer of Solar System exploration,” said PSI colleague Mark Sykes. “Her work continues to reverberate today. She opened the door to the direct study of planet formation around other stars. She mapped out the distribution of water in the inner Solar System using a spectrometer of her own design. She has been and continues to be an inspiration to her colleagues.
The DPS, founded in 1968, is the largest special-interest Division of the AAS. The AAS, established in 1899, is the major organization of professional astronomers in North America.
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