BepiColombo’s first tastes of Mercury science

Written by Copernical Team Friday, 15 October 2021 08:00

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The magnetic and particle environment around Mercury was sampled by BepiColombo for the first time during the mission’s close flyby of the planet at 199 km on 1-2 October 2021, while the huge gravitational pull of the planet was felt by its accelerometers.

The magnetic and accelerometer data have been converted into sound files and presented here for the first time. They capture the ‘sound’ of the solar wind as it bombards a planet close to the Sun, the flexing of the spacecraft as it responded to the change in temperature as it flew from the night to dayside of the planet,

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Sound of the solar wind at Mercury
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The data has been converted into sound to be audible to the human ear. The resulting sonification captures the changing intensity of the magnetic field and solar wind, including the moment the spacecraft crossed the magnetosheath – the highly turbulent boundary region between the solar wind and the magnetosphere around the planet.

Once in Mercury orbit, complementary magnetic field measurements made by both ESA’s MPO and JAXA’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (known as Mio) will lead to a detailed analysis of the planet’s magnetic field and its source, in order to better understand the origin, evolution and current state of the planet’s interior. Moreover, the two orbiters will travel through different areas of Mercury’s magnetosphere and on different timescales, measuring simultaneously how the magnetic field changes over time and in space, and its relationship to the powerful solar wind.

In the meantime, Daniel and his colleagues will start to follow up on questions such as: can the characteristics of the magnetic field from the northern hemisphere be easily transferred to the southern hemisphere? Has the magnetic field generated by the dynamo perhaps even changed in the last six years after the Messenger mission – as it continuously does on Earth? The new BepiColombo flyby data – and eventually data from its main science mission – will be compared with global magnetic field models created from the Messenger mission to create the most accurate picture yet of Mercury’s magnetic field.