HR: 0830h
AN: SM31C-1118    [PDF]
TI: Modelling Mercury's Magnetosphere
AU: * Scuffham, J W
EM: james.scuffham@imperial.ac.uk
AF: Imperial College London, South Kensington, London, SW72BW United Kingdom
AU: Balogh, A
EM: a.balogh@imperial.ac.uk
AF: Imperial College London, South Kensington, London, SW72BW United Kingdom
AB: There have been many attempts to model the magnetosphere of Mercury based on simply scaling models of the Earth's magnetosphere. This approach has had many successes, but it remains physically unsatisfactory, as it ignores the different boundary conditions that apply at the two planets. The higher Solar Wind dynamic pressure and smaller dipole moment at Mercury make its magnetosphere very small and highly dynamic; Solar Wind driven convection is the dominant plasma transport process. The higher interplanetary magnetic field means that reconnection may be able to proceed more efficiently, making the magnetosphere adopt a very open configuration. In the absence of trapped particles, no ring current forms at Mercury. In addition, field aligned currents may be insignificant due to the lack of a significant ionosphere. We have analysed existing magnetospheric modelling techniques, particularly those of Tsyganenko, and have applied them directly to Mercury with these different boundary conditions. The lack of data has made the parameterisation of the model very difficult. However, the advantage of the model is that it will be possible to use new data as it becomes available from Messenger and BepiColombo. In the meantime, we have explored the possibility of using the results of MHD simulations to constrain the various parameters of the model.
DE: 2708 Current systems (2409)
DE: 2753 Numerical modeling
DE: 2756 Planetary magnetospheres (5443, 5737, 6030)
DE: 6235 Mercury
SC: SPA - Magnetospheric Physics [SM]
MN: 2003 Fall Meeting