Spectroscopic Observation Of The Sodium Tail On Mercury At Mt. Haleakala

Details Spectroscopic Observation Of The Sodium Tail On Mercury At Mt. Haleakala Spectroscopic Observation Of The Sodium Tail On Mercury At Mt. Haleakala

Oct 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007dps....39.2501f&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #39, #25.01; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.458

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

1

Scientific paper

Mercury sodium exosphere has been intensively investigated since its discovery in 1985 by ground-based spectroscopic observation. While there have been a number of works regarding sodium distribution on Mercury, the sodium tail that extends anti-sunward direction due to solar radiation pressure is the subject in the present study.
Because of difficulty in observation of the Mercury sodium tail due to the fact that sodium emission in the tail is much weaker compared to that on the Mercury disk, its observation results have only been given by Potter et al. [2002] and Kameda et al. [2006]. Potter et al. [2002] showed that the tail extends 40,000 km in the north-south direction, and at least also 40,000 km in the east-west direction. Their observation also provided us with information such like velocity distribution of sodium atoms in the tail, lifetime for ionization, and initial velocity of sodium atoms at the surface.We have made observation of the Mercury sodium tail at Mt. Haleakala in Maui, Hawaii using a high-dispersion Echell spectrograph coupled to a 40-cm Schmidt Cassegrain telescope on June 6, 8, 10 and 11 in 2007. In our observation, it was confirmed that the sodium tail extends as far as 250,000 km (100RM) from Mercury. Since the spectrograph slit was also aligned to the north-south direction, two-dimensional distribution of the tail was obtained. Our results, being third observation of the Mercury sodium tail, will be able to provide the behavior of sodium atoms beyond 40,000 km from Mercury. Detailed results of the data analysis will be given at the presentation along with comparison between our results and the past works.

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