A comprehensive model of the meteoroid environment around Mercury

Abstract

To characterize the meteoroid environment around Mercury and its contribution to the planet's exosphere, we combined four distinctive sources of meteoroids in the solar system: main-belt asteroids, Jupiter family comets, Halley-type comets, and Oort Cloud comets. All meteoroid populations are described by currently available dynamical models. We used a recent calibration of the meteoroid influx onto Earth as a constraint for the combined population model on Mercury. We predict vastly different distributions of orbital elements, impact velocities and directions of arrival for all four meteoroid populations at Mercury. We demonstrate that the most likely model of Mercury's meteoroid environment- in the sense of agreement with Earth -provides good agreement with previously reported observations of Mercury's exosphere by the MESSENGER spacecraft and is not highly sensitive to variations of uncertain parameters such as the ratio of these populations at Earth, the size frequency distribution, and the collisional lifetime of meteoroids. Finally, we provide a fully calibrated model consisting of high-resolution maps of mass influx and surface vaporization rates for different values of Mercury's true anomaly angle.

arXiv comment46 pages, 28 figures, accepted to ApJ

References in corpus (9)

• Cometary Origin of the Zodiacal Cloud and Carbonaceous Micrometeorites
• Dynamical Model for the Zodiacal Cloud and Sporadic Meteors
• Origin and Evolution of Short-Period Comets
• The Flux of Kilogram-Sized Meteoroids from Lunar Impact Monitoring
• Planck 2013 results. XIV. Zodiacal emission
• Dynamics of Dust Particles Released from Oort Cloud Comets and Their Contribution to Radar Meteors
• Reconciling the dawn-dusk asymmetry in Mercury's exosphere with the micrometeoroid impact directionality
• A reproducible method to determine the meteoroid mass index
• An Oort cloud origin of the Halley-type comets

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Investigating Mercury's Environment with the Two-Spacecraft BepiColombo Mission
• The Near-Sun Dust Environment: Initial Observations from Parker Solar Probe
• The Dawn of Dust Astronomy
• Micrometeoroid Events in LISA Pathfinder
• MESSENGER observations of planetary ion enhancements at Mercury's northern magnetospheric cusp during Flux Transfer Event Showers
• Supercatastrophic disruption of asteroids in the context of SOHO comet, fireball and meteor observations
• Exogenous delivery of water to Mercury
• Modeling Meteoroid Impacts on the Juno spacecraft