- 1Austrian Academy of Sciences, IWF, Graz, Austria
- 2INAF-IAPS, Rome, Italy
- 3IGEP, TU Braunschweig, Germany
- 4Climate and Space Sciences, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA
- 5MPS, Goettingen, Germany
- 6Swedish Institute of Space Physics, Kiruna, Sweden
BepiColombo, the joint ESA-JAXA mission on route to the planet Mercury, was launched in 2018. After eight successful planetary flybys, the spacecraft had its final Mercury flyby on 08 Jan 2025. The PICAM (Planetary Ion Camera) instrument, part of the SERENA package, was operational from 48 hours prior to the closest encounter, until 48 hours afterwards. This ion sensor successfully monitored the upstream solar wind, as well as the magnetospheric and planetary ions at the vicinity of Mercury. Near the planet, PICAM operated in mass spectrometry mode using its Hadamard Time-of-Flight gating, which is a novel technique to improve the observations of low-density ions. We present the analysis of the ion species detected at Mercury’s environment.
How to cite: Varsani, A., Lammer, H., Milillo, A., Schmid, D., Heyner, D., Raines, J., Laky, G., Krupp, N., Jeszenszky, H., Giono, G., Volwerk, M., Teubenbacher, D., Nakamura, R., Orsini, S., Livi, S., Barabash, S., Fraenz, M., Krueger, H., Aronica, A., and Kazakov, A.: Ion species of Mercury’s 6th flyby, detected by PICAM's Hadamard mass spectrometry, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-11316, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-11316, 2025.
