Athena
Mission typeAsteroid flyby
OperatorNASA
Mission duration2 years (planned)
Spacecraft properties
Launch mass≈ 182 kg (401 lb)
Start of mission
Launch date2022 (proposed)
Flyby of 2 Pallas
 
An ultraviolet image of Pallas showing its spherical shape, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2007.

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]

Objectives

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]

References

  1. ^ a b Dorminey, Bruce (10 March 2019). "Proposed NASA SmallSat Mission Could Be First To Visit Pallas, Our Third Largest Asteroid". Forbes. Retrieved 10 March 2019.
  2. ^ "Athena: A SmallSat Mission to (2) Pallas". Archived from the original on 21 November 2021. Retrieved 5 December 2020.
  3. ^ Finalists Selected for NASA’s SIMPLEx Program 24 June 2019
  4. ^ a b Athena: the first-ever encounter of (2) Pallas with a Smallsat. J. G. O'Rourke, J. Castillo-Rogez, L. T. Elkins-Tanton, R. R. Fu, T. N. Harrison, S. Marchi, R. Park, B. E. Schmidt, D. A. Williams, C. C. Seybold, R. N. Schindhelm, J. D. Weinberg. 50th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference 2019 (LPI Contrib. No. 2132)
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