NewAthena factsheet

Name: NewAthena (New Advanced Telescope for High-ENergy Astrophysics)

Status: Athena was selected as the second large (‘L-class’) mission in ESA's Cosmic Vision 2015–25 plan in 2014. From 2022-2023, the mission underwent a design-to-cost exercise aiming at a mission design that meets the cost requirements set by the Science Programme Committee (SPC) but nevertheless delivers scientific excellence and ambition in line with that expected of a flagship L-class mission. At the November 2023 meeting, the SPC endorsed a rescoped version of the Athena X-ray observatory (NewAthena).

The mission is now in the study phase; once the mission design and costing have been completed, it will be proposed for ‘adoption’ in early 2027, after which construction can begin.

Planned launch: 2037 on an Ariane 6.4

Mission theme: Sharp focus on the X-ray Universe

Mission objectives: NewAthena will be the largest X-ray observatory ever built. It will investigate some of the hottest and most energetic phenomena in the Universe with unprecedented accuracy and depth. NewAthena will be open to the worldwide astronomical community. NewAthena is therefore expected to have a revolutionary impact on almost every corner of modern astrophysics: planets and exoplanets, compact objects (neutron stars and stellar-mass black holes) in our own galaxy, supernova explosions and remnants, and active stars, to mention just a few examples.

NewAthena will address key questions in astrophysics, such as: How and why does ordinary matter assemble into the structures (galaxies, galaxy groups and galaxy clusters) that we see today? and How do black holes grow and shape their environment, as well as the cosmological evolution of the galaxies hosting them?

To understand these questions, it is necessary to a) map hot gas in the Universe (in the space between galaxies, clusters and groups of galaxies) to determine its physical properties and evolution, and b) discover accreting supermassive black holes out into the early Universe and reveal how matter and energy flow in and out of these systems.

To achieve these goals, we need to observe gas at millions of degrees in temperature, and energetic phenomena involving particles moving at speeds comparable to the speed of light. This requires space-based observations in the X-ray portion of the electromagnetic spectrum – which NewAthena will provide.

What’s special? NewAthena combines the largest X-ray telescope ever built with state-of-the-art scientific instruments. The observatory’s scientific performance will exceed any existing or planned X-ray mission by more than ten times in several different ways: light collecting area, X-ray survey speed, weak emission line sensitivity and spatially-resolved high-resolution spectroscopy.

Unexpected events: NewAthena will be able to rapidly respond to unexpected events occurring anywhere in the sky – within twelve hours for 34% of these events. The spacecraft will be able to follow-up on transient sources, most notably those associated with gravitational wave and neutrino events.

Spacecraft and instruments: The NewAthena scientific payload will have three key elements:

• an X-ray telescope with a focal length of 12 metres, and the largest collecting area ever studied
• two instruments:
  • an X-ray Integral Field Unit (X-IFU) for high-spectral resolution imaging
  • a Wide Field Imager (WFI) for high count rate, moderate resolution spectroscopy over a large field of view

Journey and orbit: NewAthena will be launched to a halo orbit around the Sun-Earth Lagrange point 1 (L1)

Lifetime: Five years, with possible extensions

Collaboration with LISA: There is the exciting and unique opportunity for NewAthena to collaborate with ESA’s forthcoming space-based gravitational wave detector LISA, planned for launch in 2035.

While NewAthena and LISA are individually outstanding, the additional science that the two missions will achieve by operating concurrently and gathering coordinated observations (so-called ‘multi-messenger’ astronomy) will provide further breakthroughs and address fundamental questions in modern astrophysics. Together, the duo will unveil new clues about distant and merging black holes, bright quasars in active galaxies, rapid jets believed to be produced around spinning black holes, the cosmic distance scale, and the speed of gravity. These synergies are addressed in this paper from the Athena-LISA Synergy Working Group.

Partnership: NewAthena is an ESA-led mission with important contributions from NASA and possibly other international partners (e.g., JAXA). The WFI instrument is provided by an international consortium led by the Max Planck Institute for extraterrestrial Physics in Germany, involving several ESA Member States and the US. The X-IFU instrument is provided by an international consortium led by France (with IRAP as the PI Institute and CNES as the managing authority), the Netherlands (SRON, Co-PI institute) and Italy (INAF-IAPS, Co-PI institute), with further contributions from several ESA Member States, and the US.

NewAthena mission facts

NewAthena will perform around 300 observations of strong X-ray sources per year, with a typical duration of 28 hours per pointing. Mapping million-degree gas permeating the space between galaxies will be one of the mission’s primary goals.

Around five times per month, NewAthena’s routine observing plan will be interrupted by ‘target of opportunity’ observations (for example, gamma-ray bursts and other transient events).

NewAthena will observe hundreds of thousands of black holes, from relatively near to far away, and map the million-degree-hot matter in their surroundings. This includes black holes that formed in the first few hundred million years of the Universe’s long history.