Curve-of-Growth Model for Sodium D2 Emission at Mercury

Details Curve-of-Growth Model for Sodium D2 Emission at Mercury Curve-of-Growth Model for Sodium D2 Emission at Mercury

Sep 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006pasp..118.1344k&link_type=abstract

The Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Volume 118, Issue 847, pp. 1344-1350.

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

1

Radiative Transfer, Methods: Data Analysis, Planets And Satellites: General

Scientific paper

Renewed interest in the Hermean sodium exosphere has resulted from the planned encounters of two spacecraft, MESSENGER and BepiColombo, with Mercury. Both of these spacecraft will have UV-visible spectrometers on board that are capable of detecting the sodium D lines and many other species. The MSASI (Mercury Sodium Atmospheric Spectral Imager) instrument on board the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO), one of two to be launched with the ESA BepiColombo mission to Mercury, is a Fabry-Pérot spectrometer that has been specifically designed to image the sodium exosphere of Mercury. Because the data rates will be high, a curve-of-growth model for the intensity is useful. We show in this paper how the intensity varies not only with column abundance, but also with the observing geometry. The curve of growth is shown to be a strong function of solar incidence angle and planetary phase angle. Thus, the simple curve-of-growth model based on the assumption of observation at zero phase angle is inadequate for observations of Mercury's exosphere. The solar flux reflected from the planet's surface contributes a small amount to the exospheric intensity. We show that the D2/D1 ratio is inadequate to determine column abundance and has a strong dependence on the surface reflectivity for lines observed over the surface.

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