A well-attended Athena session organized by Mike Garcia, Rob Petre & Randall Smith was held at the 229th American Astronomical Society meeting in January 2017. In addition to overview talks on the mission and instruments, an open discussion on the prospective US data centre was held. A series of community desiderata and potential challenges were highlighted: calibration will be of the highest importance (Hitomi lesson learned: scientists will require performance well exceeding the requirements); the analysis of high-resolution spectroscopic data of extended sources is challenging; it is not obvious how to perform efficiently 3-D forward-folding modelling (in the spectral and imaging domains); dealing with systematics will become more and more critical.

Presentations of the meeting are available to the community at the following link.