P078-0001
Mercury-solar wind interaction: Simulations of kinetic effects

Wednesday, 16 December 2020
Poster
Esa Jukka Kallio1, Riku Jarvinen1,2, Shashikant Gupta3 and Tuija I Pulkkinen4,5, (1)Aalto University, School of Electrical Engineering, Department of Electronics and Nanoengineering, Espoo, Finland, (2)Finnish Meteorological Institute, Helsinki, Finland, (3)Aalto University, Aalto, Finland, (4)University of Michigan, Department of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering, Ann Arbor, United States, (5)Aalto University, Department of Electronics and Nanoengineering, Espoo, Finland
Abstract:
Hermean intrinsic magnetic field is weak and the magnetosphere of Mercury is much smaller compared to Earth’s magnetosphere. Therefore, the forming “pocket size” mini magnetosphere provides a unique place to investigate the role of kinetic effects resulting from a non-Maxwellian ion velocity distribution function and a finite ion gyroradius effects. In this work, we investigate kinetic effects near Mercury with a 3D hybrid model. Recent studies based on our parallel hybrid model have shown that the simulation has an adequate spatial resolution to investigate, in detail, the ion 3D velocity distributions near Mercury and the foreshock ULF waves. In this presentation, we focus on the simulated 3D ion velocity distributions at various sites around Mercury, and discuss their possible role in magnetospheric processes and regions. We also introduce methods to automatically analyze basic properties of the velocity distributions in the simulation.
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