Modeling Mercury's magnetosheath by the potential-mapping method
- 1Institut für Theoretische Physik, Technische Universität Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany (henry.holzkamp@tu-braunschweig.de)
- 2Space Research Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Graz, Austria
- 3Institut für Geophysik und extraterrestrische Physik, Technische Universität Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany
Modeling the plasma and magnetic field state in Mercury's magnetosheath is one of the most urgent tasks in Mercury science in view of the upcoming BepiColombo mission. By considering the steady-state and constructing the Laplace equation for the scalar magnetic potential in the magnetosheath (eliminating the interplanetary magnetic field in the magnetosphere and vice versa), the plasma and magnetic field state is obtained as a function of the solar wind condition and the spatial coordinates of the magnetosphere. We make extensive use of the exact solution of the Laplace equation for the parabolically shaped magnetosheath, and map the solution onto the realistic shape of magnetosheath by assuming the magnetosheath thickness is scalable between the parabolic shape and the realistic shape along the magnetopause-normal direction. The quality of the constructed model can successfully be tested against the global hybrid simulation of Mercury's magnetosheath, promising that the model serves as a useful tool for BepiColombo's detailed magnetosheath studies at Mercury.
How to cite: Holzkamp, H., Schmid, D., Heyner, D., Pump, K., and Narita, Y.: Modeling Mercury's magnetosheath by the potential-mapping method , EGU General Assembly 2024, Vienna, Austria, 14–19 Apr 2024, EGU24-2214, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-2214, 2024.
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