Thomas Voirin

European Space Research and Technology Centre

Papers

Total Citations

H-Index

About

Thomas Voirin is a space systems engineer whose research focuses on planetary exploration, autonomous spacecraft navigation, and sample return mission architectures. His most cited work, "The exploration of PHOBOS: Design of a Sample Return mission" (2018, 10 citations), outlines a pioneering concept for retrieving material from the Martian moon Phobos, contributing to the growing international interest in small-body exploration and in-situ resource utilization. Voirin also advanced the field of autonomous landing systems with his paper "Single camera absolute motion based digital elevation mapping for a next generation planetary lander" (2014, 7 citations), which proposed a novel method for real-time terrain reconstruction using only a single camera—a critical capability for future missions to poorly characterized surfaces. His work "A virtual test environment for validating spacecraft optical navigation" (2013) addresses the challenge of verifying machine vision algorithms for planetary approach, landing, and rendezvous operations through high-fidelity simulation. Although his citation counts are modest, Voirin’s contributions are foundational to the development of robust, vision-based navigation systems for next-generation robotic explorers, bridging the gap between simulation and flight-ready autonomy.