SHOTS is a project of the Young Scientists Working Group within the BepiColombo Science Working team.
The first planet in our solar system, Mercury, has been in the focus of two finished satellite missions, Mariner 10 (1974-1975) and MESSENGER (2008-2015) and will be the target of the joint ESA and JAXA mission BepiColombo in 2025.
Numerous scientific breakthroughs have been made through the analysis of the observations of the involved instruments and the application of multiple simulation codes.
The different numerical approaches to the solar wind interaction with the magnetosphere of Mercury, MHD, hybrid, and full particle, also focus on specialized applications.
This study will be the first approach to benchmark multiple simulation codes of the solar wind interaction with Mercury to hereby pre-defined ‘standard simulation parameters’ to understand the specialized applications for each simulation code.