Overview of magnetic field observations from MESSENGER’s third flyby of Mercury

Details Overview of magnetic field observations from MESSENGER’s third flyby of Mercury Overview of magnetic field observations from MESSENGER’s third flyby of Mercury

Dec 2009

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009agufm.p24a..03k&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2009, abstract #P24A-03

Physics

[5440] Planetary Sciences: Solid Surface Planets / Magnetic Fields And Magnetism, [5443] Planetary Sciences: Solid Surface Planets / Magnetospheres, [5494] Planetary Sciences: Solid Surface Planets / Instruments And Techniques, [6235] Planetary Sciences: Solar System Objects / Mercury

Scientific paper

The third MESSENGER flyby of Mercury on 29 September 2009 provides the second observations of the magnetic field from the planet’s western hemisphere and the final opportunity to sample the deep magnetotail. Similar to the previous flybys on 14 January and 6 October 2008, the spacecraft entered Mercury’s magnetosphere in the post-dusk sector and traversed the magnetotail before departing sunward in the morning. The trajectory passed to within 230 km altitude at 150°W longitude at the equator. The second flyby revealed a close alignment of the internal magnetic dipole moment with the planet’s rotation axis, and the observations from the third encounter allow the estimate of the planetary magnetic field to be further refined. The previous flybys also yielded significant insight into the dynamics of Mercury’s magnetosphere and its boundaries. During the second flyby a plasmoid and a series of traveling compression regions were observed in Mercury’s magnetotail, and a large flux transfer event was observed at the dayside magnetopause. These observations proved that the solar wind interaction drives intense magnetic reconnection at rates ten times the rates observed at Earth. The system behavior during the second flyby was markedly different than that found in the first flyby, demonstrating the profound governing influence of the solar wind environment on Mercury’s magnetosphere. Despite the difference in magnetic activity between the first two MESSENGER flybys, both exhibited a clear dayside boundary layer. We present here an updated estimate for the planetary dipole moment and new insights into the dynamics of this smallest and most highly variable of our solar system’s planetary magnetospheres.

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