Investigating Mercury’s environment with the two-spacecraft BepiColombo mission
File(s)Milillo2020_Article_InvestigatingMercurySEnvironme.pdf (8.02 MB)
Published version
Author(s)
Type
Journal Article
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.
Date Issued
2020-07-14
Date Acceptance
2020-06-22
Citation
Space Science Reviews, 2020, 216, pp.1-78
ISSN
0038-6308
Publisher
Springer Verlag
Start Page
1
End Page
78
Journal / Book Title
Space Science Reviews
Volume
216
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2020. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License,
which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as
you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons
licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material.
If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted
by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the
copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as
you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons
licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material.
If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted
by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the
copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
License URL
Sponsor
The Royal Society
Science and Technology Facilities Council
Identifier
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-020-00712-8
Grant Number
UF150547
ST/S006230/1
Subjects
Astronomy & Astrophysics
0201 Astronomical and Space Sciences
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
93
Date Publish Online
2020-07-14