Investigating Mercury's Environment with the Two-Spacecraft BepiColombo Mission

Abstract

The ESA-JAXA BepiColombo mission will provide simultaneous measurements from two spacecraft, offering an unprecedented opportunity to investigate magnetospheric and exospheric dynamics at Mercury as well as their interactions with the solar wind, radiation, and interplanetary dust. Many scientific instruments onboard the two spacecraft will be completely, or partially devoted to study the near-space environment of Mercury as well as the complex processes that govern it. Many issues remain unsolved even after the MESSENGER mission that ended in 2015. The specific orbits of the two spacecraft, MPO and Mio, and the comprehensive scientific payload allow a wider range of scientific questions to be addressed than those that could be achieved by the individual instruments acting alone, or by previous missions. These joint observations are of key importance because many phenomena in Mercury's environment are highly temporally and spatially variable. Examples of possible coordinated observations are described in this article, analysing the required geometrical conditions, pointing, resolutions and operation timing of different BepiColombo instruments sensors.

78 pages, 14 figures, published

References in corpus (4)

• Is Proxima Centauri b habitable? -- A study of atmospheric loss
• Dust detection by the wave instrument on STEREO: nanoparticles picked up by the solar wind?
• Reconciling the dawn-dusk asymmetry in Mercury's exosphere with the micrometeoroid impact directionality
• Application of the electromotive force as a shock front indicator in the inner heliosphere

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Review of Mercury's Dynamic Magnetosphere: Post-MESSENGER Era and Comparative Magnetospheres
• On the Mesoscale Structure of CMEs at Mercury's Orbit: BepiColombo and Parker Solar Probe Observations
• CMEs and SEPs During November-December 2020: A Challenge for Real-Time Space Weather Forecasting
• MESSENGER observations of planetary ion enhancements at Mercury's northern magnetospheric cusp during Flux Transfer Event Showers
• Electron dynamics in small magnetospheres: insights from global fully-kinetic plasma simulations of planet Mercury
• Electron acceleration driven by the lower-hybrid-drift instability: an extended quasilinear model
• Effects of Mercury surface temperature on the sodium abundance in its exosphere
• Slow-mode rarefaction and compression fronts in the Hermean magnetosphere: From MESSENGER insights to future BepiColombo observations