| Auteur(s) supplémentaire(s) | Rami Vainio, Haruka Ueno, Marco Pinto, Philipp Oleynik, Satoko Nakamura, Aiko Nagamatsu, Go Murakami, Richard Moissl, Yoshizumi Miyoshi, Shoya Matsuda, Arlindo Marques, Arto Lehtolainen, Alexander Kozyrev, Seppo Korpela, Emilia Kilpua, Rosie Johnson, Juhani Huovelin, Daniel Heyner, Wojtek Hajdas, Lina Hadid, Manuel Grande, Patricia Gonçalves, Eero Esko, Carlota Cardoso, Johannes Benkhoff, Nicolas Andre, Sae Aizawa |
Abstract | BepiColombo is a joint mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to the planet Mercury that was launched in October 2018 and it is due to arrive at Mercury in late 2025. It consists of two spacecraft, the Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) built by ESA and the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO) built by JAXA. BepiColombo has a large suite of instruments dedicated to plasma and solar physics that will allow us to characterize the solar wind and solar particles interaction with the Hermean environment and, therefore, to get the most detail to date characterization of the Hermean Space Weather awareness. Most of the relevant instruments are operated during the cruise phase on a regular basis, including the Solar Intensity X-Ray and Particle Spectrometer (SIXS), the BepiColombo Environmental Radiation Monitor (BERM), the Solar Particle Monitor (SPM), the Mercury Gamma and Neutron Spectrometer (MGNS), the BepiColombo Planetary Magnetometer (MPO-MAG) and the Mercury Electron Analyzer (MEA). These instruments are being calibrated using cruise data, and they are providing good insights into the Space Weather context that BepiColombo will encounter after Mercury’s orbit insertion, as well. For example, so far BepiColombo has detected tens of solar particle events during the cruise, several of them at locations in the inner Solar System that provide excellent opportunities for multispacecraft studies, such as the recent solar event occurred on 28 March 2022 where BepiColombo was well aligned with STEREO-A in the Parker spiral, and almost radially aligned with Earth. In this work, we perform an assessment of the Space Weather context that BepiColombo will encounter at Mercury based on current observations, and of the potential consequences for the Hermean environment. |
