🚀 Witnessing an X-ray aurora up close, from the surface of Mercury! Thanks to BepiColombo, we've discovered these aurorae are caused by solar wind particles raining down on the planet's dawn side. 🌌
, a joint project between the European Space Agency and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency.
Each side funded a probe – the Mercury Planetary Orbiter and the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter, respectively – and the two flew to the planet in a docked configuration. They’ll remain joined at the hip for a total of seven years, until reaching final orbit around Mercury in 2025. To get there, the joint spacecraft has taken a circuitous route, looping around Earth and Venus before gliding over to Mercury. During the next few years, BepiColombo will perform several flybys to slow down and ready itself for final orbit.On the first such barnstorming, in 2021, the pair came within 125 miles of Mercury and used plasma instruments to detect different types of charged particles in the solar wind.
Researchers later concluded that charged particles fly up from the dark side of the planet and rain down on the dawn side, thereby releasing X-rays and producing the auroral glow. Unlike Earth’s magnetosphere, Mercury’s isn’t powerful enough to shield the planet from the solar wind. “While Mercury’s magnetosphere is much smaller than Earth’s and has a different structure and dynamics, we have confirmation that the mechanism that generates aurorae is the same throughout the solar system,” said Aizawa.
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