The Current Impact Flux of Asteroids on Mercury and Its Seasonal Variation

We estimate the current impact flux on Mercury and its seasonal variation using the Öpik–Wetherill method and the latest estimates on Mercury-crossing asteroids. Mercury's high eccentricity suggests that the seasonal variation of impacts from small asteroids could be extreme. Generating model populations is challenging due to the highly biased observations of Mercury-crossing objects, particularly the Atira asteroids, which orbit entirely within Earth's orbit. To address this, we examine how our results change with different number ratios of sub-populations. Future observations of newly formed impact craters from the ESA BepiColombo mission might help validate our findings and refine our models further.