Investigating Mercury's Environment with the Two-Spacecraft BepiColombo Mission

TL;DR

The BepiColombo mission employs two spacecraft to provide comprehensive, simultaneous measurements of Mercury's magnetospheric and exospheric environment, enabling new insights into its complex space weather interactions.

Contribution

This study details the scientific objectives, instrument coordination, and observational strategies of the BepiColombo mission for studying Mercury's environment.

Findings

Design of coordinated observation strategies

Analysis of geometrical conditions for measurements

Potential to resolve temporal and spatial variability

Abstract

The ESA-JAXA BepiColombo mission will provide simultaneous measurements from two spacecraft, offering an unprecedented opportunity to investigate magnetospheric and exospheric dynamics at Mercury as well as their interactions with the solar wind, radiation, and interplanetary dust. Many scientific instruments onboard the two spacecraft will be completely, or partially devoted to study the near-space environment of Mercury as well as the complex processes that govern it. Many issues remain unsolved even after the MESSENGER mission that ended in 2015. The specific orbits of the two spacecraft, MPO and Mio, and the comprehensive scientific payload allow a wider range of scientific questions to be addressed than those that could be achieved by the individual instruments acting alone, or by previous missions. These joint observations are of key importance because many phenomena in Mercury's environment are highly temporally and spatially variable. Examples of possible coordinated observations are described in this article, analysing the required geometrical conditions, pointing, resolutions and operation timing of different BepiColombo instruments sensors.