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]
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]
↑ 4,04,1Athena: 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)
