Mio—First Comprehensive Exploration of Mercury’s Space Environment: Mission Overview

Go Murakami (1) , Hajime Hayakawa (1) , Hiroyuki Ogawa (1) , Shoya Matsuda (1) , Taeko Seki (1) , Yasumasa Kasaba , Yoshifumi Saito (1) , Ichiro Yoshikawa , Masanori Kobayashi , Wolfgang Baumjohann (2) , Ayako Matsuoka , Hirotsugu Kojima , Satoshi Yagitani , Michel Moncuquet (3) , Jan-Erik Wahlund (4) , Dominique Delcourt (5) , Masafumi Hirahara , Stas Barabash , Oleg Korablev (6) , Masaki Fujimoto (1)

1 JAXA - Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency [Sagamihara]
2 OeAW - Austrian Academy of Sciences
3 LESIA - Laboratoire d'études spatiales et d'instrumentation en astrophysique = Laboratory of Space Studies and Instrumentation in Astrophysics
4 IRF - Swedish Institute of Space Physics [Uppsala]
5 LPC2E - Laboratoire de Physique et Chimie de l'Environnement et de l'Espace
6 IKI - Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Mercury has a unique and complex space environment with its weak global magnetic field, intense solar wind, tenuous exosphere, and magnetospheric plasma particles. This complex system makes Mercury an excellent science target to understand effects of the solar wind to planetary environments. In addition, investigating Mercury’s dynamic magnetosphere also plays a key role to understand extreme exoplanetary environment and its habitability conditions against strong stellar winds. BepiColombo, a joint mission to Mercury by the European Space Agency and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, will address remaining open questions using two spacecraft, Mio and the Mercury Planetary Orbiter. Mio is a spin-stabilized spacecraft designed to investigate Mercury’s space environment, with a powerful suite of plasma instruments, a spectral imager for the exosphere, and a dust monitor. Because of strong constraints on operations during its orbiting phase around Mercury, sophisticated observation and downlink plans are required in order to maximize science outputs. This paper gives an overview of the Mio spacecraft and its mission, operations plan, and data handling and archiving.

Keywords: BepiColombo; Mercury; Magnetosphere; Exosphere; Dust; Planetary environment

Domains: Sciences of the Universe [physics]

Go Murakami, Hajime Hayakawa, Hiroyuki Ogawa, Shoya Matsuda, Taeko Seki, et al.. Mio—First Comprehensive Exploration of Mercury’s Space Environment: Mission Overview. Space Science Reviews, 2020, 216 (7), ⟨10.1007/s11214-020-00733-3⟩. ⟨insu-02992578⟩