Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2006

High resolution observations of Mercury's exosphere

Résumé

Before the arrival of Messenger at Mercury in 2008 the only source of information available on Mercury s environment is observations done from ground based observatories These observations provided a now large data set on Mercury s exosphere and in particular of its sodium component originally discovered by Potter et al Science 1985 Two other elements have been discovered in the same way the potassium Potter et al Icarus 1986 and the calcium Bida et al 2000 All this information helped us to much better understand the formation of Mercury s exosphere Moreover it helps to design of the payload of the forthcoming Bepi-Colombo mission High resolution spectroscopy has been obtained on night 29 and 30 october 2005 at the 3 6-m NTT telescope of ESO La Silla Chile using the EMMI instrument in its echelle spectroscopy mode Configuration of Mercury was favourable with an angular diameter of 6 arcseconds and the planet close to quadrature The disk of the planet has been scanned for spatial variation of the exospheric species The large spectral range of EMMI 3850-8550 A and high resolution R 75000 allow simultaneous measurements of the integrated column density of Na and K as well as search for non-identified species of Mercury s exosphere Data will be presented and discussed

Fichier non déposé

Dates et versions

hal-03802944 , version 1 (06-10-2022)

Identifiants

Citer

Alain Doressoundiram, François Leblanc, C. Foellmi. High resolution observations of Mercury's exosphere. 36th COSPAR Scientific Assembly, Jul 2006, Beijing, China. pp.2844. ⟨hal-03802944⟩
69 Consultations
0 Téléchargements

Partager

  • More