Other
Scientific paper
May 2004
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2004agusmsa22a..01l&link_type=abstract
American Geophysical Union, Spring Meeting 2004, abstract #SA22A-01
Other
2427 Ionosphere/Atmosphere Interactions (0335), 5409 Atmospheres: Structure And Dynamics, 5707 Atmospheres: Structure And Dynamics, 5780 Tori And Exospheres
Scientific paper
Mariner 10 is the only spacecraft to have been close enough to observe Mercury's exosphere by UV spectrometry. After the three flybies of Mariner 10, Earth based observations have provided some complementary information on Mercury's exosphere. Thus, the next planed future missions, Messenger and Bepi Colombo should dramatically improve our knowledge of Mercury's exosphere. Therefore up to now, most of the efforts to describe Mercury's exosphere considered only the sodium exosphere, the best known component easily observable from Earth based ground observatory thanks to its strong resonant emission. In this talk, I will describe the particularities of Mercury's surface bounded exosphere due to the length of Mercury's day with respect to Mercury's year, to the strong temperature gradient at the surface from day to night sides, and as a consequence the importance of surface/exosphere interaction, and to its intrinsic small magnetosphere which allows direct solar wind/surface interaction and a particular magnetospheric ion circulation. All these particularities give to Mercury's exosphere its peculiarity. But the most important and up to now most debated point when describing Mercury's exosphere is to properly include all the loss and supply processes of Mercury's exosphere. In the case of the sodium exosphere, several laboratory studies helped modelers to constrain such processes, whereas the present lack of laboratory studies and observations for the other elements supposed to be present in Mercury's exosphere make their study one of the main objective and most promising result of the future planed missions.
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