BepiColombo First Mercury Fly-by: first taste of the mission results on investigation of the environment around the planet
- 1INAF, Istituto di Astrofisica e Planetologia Spaziali, Rome, Italy
- *A full list of authors appears at the end of the abstract
The ESA-JAXA BepiColombo satellite suite has passed by its target planet Mercury for the first time on 1st October 2021. The flyby trajectory was passing Mercury in the southern hemisphere from nightside dusk toward dayside dawn, thus crossing the magnetosheath, the magnetotail, nightside plasma sheet and exiting in dayside dawnward magnetopause and bow shock. It explored, for the first time, regions never observed by other spacecraft in the past. All the instruments able to perform science observations in cruise configurations have been operated providing the first observations of Mercury’s inner southern magnetosphere and surrounding regions. These observations include magnetic fields, solar wind and magnetospheric ions and electrons in different energy ranges, plasma waves, energetic particles and exosphere. During the pass, BepiColombo encountered a low interplanetary magnetic field and low energy solar wind. Unexpected interesting signals have been observed in the solar wind before the magnetospheric bow shock, at the magnetopause inbound as well as in the outbound solar wind. This paper will present a general overview of the observations, just as a first taste of the great results expected from this mission.
N. André2, S. Barabash3, D. Delcourt4, D. Heyner5, J. Huovelin6, R. Moissl7, M. Moncuquet8, S. Orsini1, Y. Saito9, R. Vainio10, A. Varsani11, S. Aizawa2, T. Alberti1, W. Baumjohann11, J. Benkhoff7, L. Hadid12, M. Grande13, L. Griton8, L. Gunter11, K. Issautier8, H. Jeszenszky11, Y. Kasaba14, H. Lichtenegger11, G. Murakami9, H. Nilsson3, J. Raines15, B. Sanchez-Cano16, J. Slavin15, P. Wurz17, J. Zender7, A. Aronica1, C.M. Carr18, I. Dandouras2, E. De Angelis1, E. Esko6, A. Fedorov2, B. Fiethe5, H. Fischer, D. Fontaine12, M. Fraenz19, C-H. Glassmeier5, Y. Harada20, R. Jarvinen6, E. Kallio6, T. Karlsson21, B. Katra, A. Kazakov1, H. Kojima22, S. Korpela6, N. Krupp19, H. Krueger19, F. Leblanc23, A. Lehtolainen6, S. Livi24, W. Magnes11, V. Mangano1, A. Matsuoka9, W. Miyake, R. Nakamura11, R. Noschese1, P. Oleynik10, A. Olivieri25, M. Persson2, M. Phillips24, C. Plainaki25, R. Rispoli1, J A Sauvaud2, D. Schmid11, R. Sordini1, B. Trantham24, C. Verdeil, N. Vertolli1, S. Yagitani26, I. Yoshikawa14, S. Yokota27, J.-E. Wahlund3, M. Wieser3, R. Wallner 1. INAF/IAPS, Italy 2. IRAP, France 3. IRF, Sweden 4. Orleans University, France 5. Braunschweig University, Germany. 6. Helsinki University, Finland 7. ESA/ESTEC, The Netherlands. 8. LESIA, Sorbonne Université, France 9. JAXA/ISAS, Japan 10. Turku University, Finland 11. IWF, Austria 12. LPP Polytechnique Paris, France 13. University of Wales, UK 14. Tokyo University, Japan 15. Michigan University, MI, USA 16. University of Leicester, UK 17. University of Bern, Switzerland 18. Imperial College London, UK 19. Marx Plank institute, Germany 20. Kyushu University, Japan 21. KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden 22. Kyoto University, Japan 23. LATMOS/IPSL, Sorbonne Université, France 24. SWRI, TX, USA 25. ASI, Italy 26. Kanazawa University, Japan 27. Osaka University, Japan
How to cite: Milillo, A. and the BERM, MAG-MGF, MPPE, PWI, SERENA and SIXS teams: BepiColombo First Mercury Fly-by: first taste of the mission results on investigation of the environment around the planet, Europlanet Science Congress 2022, Granada, Spain, 18–23 Sep 2022, EPSC2022-543, https://doi.org/10.5194/epsc2022-543, 2022.
