Athena is an ESA-led X-ray observatory mission including contributions from NASA, selected to address ESA’s Cosmic Vision theme, “The Hot and Energetic Universe."

By combining a large X-ray telescope with state-of-the-art scientific instruments, Athena will address key questions in astrophysics: how and why does ordinary matter assemble into the galaxies and galactic clusters that we see today? How do black holes grow and influence their surroundings?

Athena's powerful instruments will also allow unprecedented studies of a wide range of astronomical phenomena. These include distant gamma-ray bursts, the hot gas found in the space surrounding black holes and trapped in clusters of galaxies, the magnetic interplay between exoplanets and their parent stars, Jupiter's auroras and comets in our own Solar System.

Status/Timeline

Home pages

LISA is an ESA-led gravitational-wave observatory mission including contributions from NASA, selected to address ESA’s Cosmic Vision theme, "The Gravitational Universe."

LISA will consist of three spacecraft in a triangular formation orbiting the Sun, separated from each other by 2.5 million kilometers and trailing the Earth by approximately 60 million kilometers as we orbit the Sun. These three spacecraft continuously exchange laser beams between one other to monitor for distortions in space-time caused by passing gravitational wave signals.

A space-based observatory can detect gravitational waves with frequencies from 1 mHz to 1 Hz, far below the frequencies of waves now observed from Earth-based interferometers like LIGO and Virgo. Many types of sources are expected in this frequency band including: merging black holes millions of times more massive than the Sun, smaller compact bodies (including regular stars, neutron stars, and stellar black holes), early in their binary orbits, and extreme-mass-ratio inspirals (EMRIs)—small bodies inspiraling into massive black holes.

Status/Timeline

Home pages

The Compton Spectrometer and Imager (COSI) is a soft gamma-ray survey telescope (0.2-5 MeV) designed to probe the origins of Galactic positrons, uncover the sites of nucleosynthesis in the Galaxy, perform pioneering studies of gamma-ray polarization, and find counterparts to multi-messenger sources. COSI’s compact Compton telescope combines improvement in sensitivity, spectral resolution, angular resolution, and sky coverage to facilitate groundbreaking science.

Through high-resolution X-ray spectroscopy, XRISM will transform our understanding of the hot and energetic universe, allowing ground-breaking new scientific research into black holes, clusters of galaxies, compact objects, and the aftermath of stellar explosions. XRISM is a JAXA/NASA collaborative mission with ESA participation, and contains two instruments: Resolve—a microcalorimeter spectrometer, providing < 7 eV spectral resolution over the 0.4–12 keV bandpass, and Xtend—a wide field CCD X-ray imager with a 38'x38' field of view. XRISM is scheduled for launch in fall 2022 on a Japanese HII-A rocket from Tanegashima Space Center.