Английская Википедия:Athena (spacecraft)
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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]
Objectives
The science goals and objectives included:[4]
- 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 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
Шаблон:Portal bar Шаблон:Planetary Missions Program Office Шаблон:Asteroid spacecraft
- ↑ 1,0 1,1 Шаблон:Cite news
- ↑ Шаблон:Cite web
- ↑ Finalists Selected for NASA’s SIMPLEx Program 24 June 2019
- ↑ 4,0 4,1 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)