Athena (spacecraft)

[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.

[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.

[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%.