''Athena'' was a proposed space mission that would have performed a single flyby of asteroid

2 Pallas Pallas ( minor-planet designation: 2 Pallas) is the second asteroid to have been discovered, after Ceres. It is believed to have a mineral composition similar to carbonaceous chondrite meteorites, like Ceres, though significantly less hy ...

, the third largest asteroid in the

Solar System The Solar System Capitalization of the name varies. The International Astronomical Union, the authoritative body regarding astronomical nomenclature, specifies capitalizing the names of all individual astronomical objects but uses mixed "Solar ...

. If ''Athena'' would have been funded, it was planned to share the launch vehicle with the ''Psyche'' and ''Janus'' spacecrafts and fly its own trajectory for a Mars

gravity assist In orbital mechanics and aerospace engineering, a gravitational slingshot, gravity assist maneuver, or swing-by is the use of the relative movement (e.g. orbit around the Sun) and gravity of a planet or other astronomical object to alter the ...

to slingshot into the

asteroid belt The asteroid belt is a torus-shaped region in the Solar System, located roughly between the orbits of the planets Jupiter and Mars. It contains a great many solid, irregularly shaped bodies, of many sizes, but much smaller than planets, called ...

. It would have taken about two years to reach Pallas. The mission's

principal investigator In many countries, the term principal investigator (PI) refers to the holder of an independent grant and the lead researcher for the grant project, usually in the sciences, such as a laboratory study or a clinical trial. The phrase is also often us ...

was Joseph O'Rourke, at

Arizona State University Arizona State University (Arizona State or ASU) is a public research university in the Phoenix metropolitan area. Founded in 1885 by the 13th Arizona Territorial Legislature, ASU is one of the largest public universities by enrollment in t ...

. 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. The ''Athena'' mission was beaten by other mission concepts such as the TransOrbital TrailBlazer lunar orbiter.''Finalists Selected for NASA’s SIMPLEx Program'' 24 June 2019
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Objectives

The science goals and objectives included: * to determine how differentiation varies on bodies with large proportions of ices and how they evolved over time. * to determine how the current population of asteroids evolved in time and space. * to understand the role of water in the evolution of Pallas. * to constrain the dynamical evolution of Pallas and asteroids in the Pallas impact family. ''Athena'' would conduct visible imaging of the geology of Pallas with a miniature color (RGB) camera. Also, a radio science experiment would use 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%.

References

Missions to main-belt asteroids Proposed NASA space probes {{US-spacecraft-stub