Reconstruction of Mercury’s internal magnetic field beyond the octupole
- 1TU Braunschweig, Institut für Theoretische Physik, AG Numerische Plasmasimulationen, Braunschweig, Germany (s.toepfer@tu-braunschweig.de)
- 2Space Research Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Graz, Austria
- 3Institut für Geophysik und extraterrestrische Physik, Technische Universität Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany
- 4Max-Planck-Institut für Sonnensystemforschung, Göttingen, Germany
- 5DLR Institute of Planetary Research, Berlin, Germany
The reconstruction of Mercury’s internal magnetic field enables us to take a look into the inner heart of Mercury. In view of the BepiColombo mission, Mercury’s magnetosphere is simulated using a hybrid plasma code, and the
multipoles of the internal magnetic field are estimated from the virtual spacecraft data using three distinct reconstruction methods: the truncated singular value decomposition, the Tikhonov regularization and Capon’s minimum variance projection. The study shows that a precise determination of Mercury’s internal field beyond the octupole up to the dotriacontapole (fifth degree of the multipole expansion) is possible. Especially, Capon’s method provides the most accurate inversion result compared to the Tikhonov regularization and the truncated singular value decomposition.
How to cite: Töpfer, S., Oertel, I., Schiron, V., Narita, Y., Glassmeier, K.-H., Heyner, D., Kolhey, P., and Motschmann, U.: Reconstruction of Mercury’s internal magnetic field beyond the octupole, EGU General Assembly 2023, Vienna, Austria, 24–28 Apr 2023, EGU23-1159, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-1159, 2023.
