Modeling The Impulsive Meteoritic Impact Vaporization In The Hermean Exosphere

Details Modeling The Impulsive Meteoritic Impact Vaporization In The Hermean Exosphere Modeling The Impulsive Meteoritic Impact Vaporization In The Hermean Exosphere

Dec 2004

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2004agufm.p23a0246m&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2004, abstract #P23A-0246

Other

5409 Atmospheres: Structure And Dynamics, 5420 Impact Phenomena (Includes Cratering), 6235 Mercury, 0322 Constituent Sources And Sinks, 0325 Evolution Of The Atmosphere

Scientific paper

As for many other aspects of Mercury, our knowledge about the Hermean exosphere and its characteristics is very limited. Many models have been studied to account for the poor observational evidences. Among these, the model by Wurz and Lammer (2003) consists of a Monte Carlo simulation of a large number of trajectories of different species ejected through different surface release processes, following ballistic orbits. Inputs are the distinctive energy and ejection angle distribution of the released particles; then the numerical integration provides a large set of trajectories from which exospheric bulk parameters are derived. The resulting exosphere looks comparable with the observed data. Among the source mechanisms, meteoritic impact vaporization has often been considered to have only a secondary role for exospheric refilling; nevertheless recent works evidenced that it could be the main acting process on the night side of the planet, where the PSD and thermal desorption cannot operate anymore. On this subject almost nothing has been investigated about objects with size larger than 1 cm. Such meteoroids have been shown to be ejected from the Main Belt and to intersect the Hermean orbit; then they are expected to become part of the meteoritic contribution. The present work reviews impact vaporization contribution to the model by Wurz and Lammer. Particularly, it is intended to superimpose on the exospheric model the vapour cloud caused by an impulsive event, and then study both the enhancement of the average exospheric density, than its dynamical evolution with time. In fact, during relatively short time periods, many small meteoroids are expected to fall on Mercury; not so frequent to contribute with a constant rate to the exosphere, but surely enough to be detected by devoted instruments on board of space missions like MESSENGER or BepiColombo.

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