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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2009

Constraints on Al, Fe and Li Abundances in Mercury's Exosphere

Résumé

Before the arrival of Messenger and Bepi Colombo at Mercury, the only source of information available on Mercury's environment is observations done from ground based observatories. We performed high spectral resolution observations of the Mercury's exosphere on the 30th and 31st October 2005 using the ESO-NTT telescope, La Silla, Chile. The large spectral range, 385-855 nm of the spectrograph EMMI provides a unique opportunity to search for non-identified species in the Hermian's environment. In this paper, we report a tentative detection of atomic aluminium in the exosphere of Mercury. This detection should be confirmed by further observations and can be used as an upper limit for this element in Mercury's exosphere. We also estimate upper limit for the column densities of Fe and Si exospheric atoms. Detection of Al, a refractory element, if confirmed, as well as its high exospheric abundance (between 2 to 18) with respect to Ca would suggest either an unexpected surface composition or a relation between exosphere and surface composition that is not well understood.
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Dates et versions

hal-03804290 , version 1 (07-10-2022)

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Alain Doressoundiram, François Leblanc. Constraints on Al, Fe and Li Abundances in Mercury's Exosphere. AAS/Division for Planetary Sciences Meeting #41, Oct 2009, Fajardo, Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico. pp.id.35.02. ⟨hal-03804290⟩
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