Electron populations observed by Mercury Electron Analyzer onboard Mio/BepiColombo during its second Mercury flyby

Autor: Sae Aizawa, Nicolas Andre, Yoshifumi Saito, Moa Persson, Jean-Andre Sauvaud, Andrei Fedorov, Shoichiro Yokota, Alain Barthe, Emmanuel Penou, Mathias Rojo, Go Murakami
Rok vydání: 2023
DOI: 10.5194/egusphere-egu23-13257
Popis: BepiColombo was launched in October 2018 and is currently en route to Mercury. Although its orbit insertion is planned for December 2025, BepiColombo will acquire new measurements during planetary flybys. During the cruise phase, the two spacecraft are docked together with Mio being protected behind the MOSIF sun shield. Thus, only partial observations of plasma distribution functions can be obtained by the Mercury Plasma Particle Experiment (MPPE) onboard Mio. However, since electrons have small Larmor radii and more isotropic distributions even in the solar wind, the two Mercury Electron Analyzer (MEA) of MPPE will provide us with new and unique measurements in the range of 5 eV to 3 keV when in solar wind mode and 3 eV to ~ 26 keV when in magnetospheric mode. We will present the interesting observations obtained by MEA onboard Mio/BepiColombo during its second Mercury flyby that happened on the 23rd of June, 2022. In particular we will focus on the properties of the low- and high-energy electron populations observed during its crossing of Mercury’s magnetosphere.
Databáze: OpenAIRE