Athena Mission Status News

Joint letter of the ASST and the SRDT to the Athena Community on 17th February 2023

Dear colleagues,

The Athena Science Study Team (ASST) was nominated by ESA in 2014 to provide scientific advice on the Athena mission, selected to address the “Hot and Energetic Universe” science topic. One of its concrete tasks was to act as a “focal point for the interests of the broad scientific community”. A large, active and diverse community of >1000 scientists from all over the world (you) has been supporting the ASST scientific activities and the mission since then. We are all very grateful to you all for this.

The ESA Science Program Committee (SPC), in its June 2022 meeting, agreed that Athena would undergo a “design-to-cost” exercise to ensure that its total cost would stay under a 1.3 billion Euro cap, re-defining a “minimally disrupted mission” profile, referred to as “NewAthena”. ESA dissolved the ASST and, after an open call, nominated the NewAthena Science Re-Definition Team (SRDT) in November 2022, to advise ESA on the scientific implications of different redesign options and to establish whether the new mission retains the flagship status commensurate to any Large-class observatory of the ESA Science Program.

Since then, ESA, the Instrument Consortia and the International Partners (JAXA and NASA) have made important steps forward in the definition of a mission profile compliant to the strict cost-at-completion cap imposed to NewAthena, while retaining an unprecedented combination of transformational scientific performance. This new mission design concept will be presented to the ESA Science Program governing bodies in preparation to the March 2023 SPC meeting, and to the elaboration of the long-term implementation plan of the Science Program that ESA should submit to the June 2023 SPC meeting.

We, the former ASST and the SRDT had a joint meeting on Monday 16 January 2023, where Matteo Guainazzi (the SRDT co-chairs, together with Mike Cruise) presented their plans for the work ahead. At the meeting, it was unanimously agreed that the SRDT, to fulfil its institutional mandate of advisory board to ESA, shall seek the support of the Athena community as currently defined in Science Working Groups and Topical Panels, in contact with the Instrument Consortia and their Principal Investigators. The ACO will continue coordinating the Athena community. At a recent de-briefing, the Topical Panel Chairs confirmed that they are ready to support the SRDT in their effort to make sure that NewAthena fulfils the ambition of the X-ray community supporting the original Athena proposal.

As said by one of the attendees of the meeting, NewAthena is not the end, but rather the start of a new process to ensure that a flagship NewAthena is back on track in the ESA scientific program.

We are looking forward to continuing to collaborate with you towards this goal.

With our best regards,

James Aird, Didier Barret, Massimo Cappi, Francisco J. Carrera, Elisa Costantini, Lia Corrales, Judith Croston, Mike Cruise, Thomas Dauser, Anne Decourchelle, Dominique Eckert, Fabio Gastaldello, Matteo Guainazzi, Jan-Willem den Herder, Hiro Matsumoto, Kirpal Nandra, Rachel Osten, Pierre-Olivier Petrucci, Luigi Piro, Delphine Porquet, Gabriel Pratt, Nanda Rea, Thomas Reiprich, Aurora Simionescu, Randall Smith, Daniele Spiga, Eleonora Troja, Norbert Werner.