ATHENA is an ESA large mission that is slated to launch in the early 2030s. The main science goals of ATHENA address the questions:
* How and why does ordinary matter assemble into the galaxies and galaxy clusters that we see today?
* How do black holes grow and influence their surroundings?
These will be accomplished thanks to a large X-ray mirror with a 5” point spread function that pivots to focus on onto one of two instruments: the X-ray Integral Field Unit (X-IFU) which is an X-ray calorimeter with ~ 2 eV spectral resolution and the Wide-Field Imager (WFI) which is a large field of view (40’ x 40’) active pixel sensor.