EGU23-13257
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-13257
EGU General Assembly 2023
© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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

Sae Aizawa1,2, Nicolas Andre3, Yoshifumi Saito1, Moa Persson4, Jean-Andre Sauvaud3, Andrei Fedorov3, Shoichiro Yokota5, Alain Barthe3, Emmanuel Penou3, Mathias Rojo3, and Go Murakami1
Sae Aizawa et al.
  • 1ISAS/JAXA, Sagamihara, Japan (aizawa@stp.isas.jaxa.jp)
  • 2Department of Physics, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy
  • 3IRAP, CNRS-UPS-CNES, Toulouse, France
  • 4Tokyo University, Kashiwa, Japan
  • 5Osaka University, Osaka, Japan

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.

How to cite: Aizawa, S., Andre, N., Saito, Y., Persson, M., Sauvaud, J.-A., Fedorov, A., Yokota, S., Barthe, A., Penou, E., Rojo, M., and Murakami, G.: Electron populations observed by Mercury Electron Analyzer onboard Mio/BepiColombo during its second Mercury flyby, EGU General Assembly 2023, Vienna, Austria, 24–28 Apr 2023, EGU23-13257, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-13257, 2023.