| Athena | |||
| Mission Type: | Asteroid flyby | ||
| Operator: | NASA | ||
| Mission Duration: | 2 years (planned) | ||
| Launch Mass: | ≈ | ||
| Launch Date: | 2022 (proposed) | ||
| Interplanetary: |
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Athena was a proposed space mission that would have performed a single flyby of asteroid 2 Pallas, the third largest asteroid in the Solar System.[1]
If Athena had been funded, it was planned to share the launch vehicle with the Psyche and Janus spacecraft and fly its own trajectory for a Mars gravity assist to slingshot into the asteroid belt. It would have taken about two years to reach Pallas.[1] The mission's principal investigator was Joseph O'Rourke, at Arizona State University.
The Athena spacecraft was examined in Category 1 of the 2018 NASA SIMPLEx competition and was eliminated before reaching Category 2; it will possibly be proposed at a later unknown time.[2] The Athena mission was beaten by other mission concepts such as the TransOrbital TrailBlazer lunar orbiter.[3]
The science goals and objectives included:[4]
Athena would have conducted visible imaging of the geology of Pallas with a miniature color (RGB) camera. Also, a radio science experiment would have used a continuous antenna pointing to Earth for two-way Doppler tracking to enable the determination of the mass of Pallas with a precision of <0.05%.[4]