Investigating Mercury’s Environment with the Two-Spacecraft BepiColombo Mission
Anna Milillo, M. Fujimoto, Go Murakami, J. Benkhoff, Joe Zender, Sae Aizawa, Melinda Dósa, Léa Griton, Daniel Heyner, G. C. Ho, S. M. Imber, Xianzhe Jia, Tomas Karlsson, R. M. Killen, Monica Laurenza, Simon Lindsay, S. McKenna‐Lawlor, A. Mura, J. M. Raines, David A. Rothery, Nicolás André, W. Baumjohann, A. A. Berezhnoy, Philippe-A. Bourdin, E. J. Bunce, F. Califano, Jan Deca, Sara de la Fuente, Chuanfei Dong, C. Grava, S. Fatemi, Pierre Henri, Stavro Ivanovski, B. V. Jackson, M. K. James, E. Kallio, Yasumasa Kasaba, Emilia Kilpua, Masanori Kobayashi, B. Langlais, François Leblanc, Christoph Lhotka, Valeria Mangano, A. Martindale, S. Massetti, A. Masters, M. Morooka, Yasuhito Narita, Joana S. Oliveira, D. Odstrčil, S. Orsini, Maria Guglielmina Pelizzo, Christina Plainaki, Ferdinand Plaschke, F. Sahraoui, K. Seki, J. A. Slavin, Rami Vainio, P. Wurz, S. Barabash, C. Carr, Dominique Delcourt, Karl‐Heinz Glaßmeier, M. Grandé, Masafumi Hirahara, J. Huovelin, Oleg Korablev, Hirotsugu Kojima, Herbert Lichtenegger, S. Livi, Ayako Matsuoka, Richard Moissl, M. Moncuquet, K. Muinonen, Éric Quémerais, Y. Saito, Satoshi Yagitani, Ichiro Yoshikawa, Jan‐Erik Wahlund
Abstract
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.