Cross-comparison of global simulation models applied to Mercury’s dayside magnetosphere, that is the title of the very first SHOTS paper, which presents our comparison between Magnetohydrodynamics and Hybrid codes and their results concerning the magnetosphere of planet Mercury.

Please read more about at : https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pss.2021.105176

Abstract: We present the first comparison of multiple global simulations of the solar wind interaction with Mercury’s dayside magnetosphere, conducted in the framework of the international collaborative project SHOTS – Studies on Hermean magnetosphere Oriented Theories and Simulations. Two 3D magnetohydrodynamic and two 3D hybrid simulation codes are used to investigate the global response of the Hermean magnetosphere without its exosphere to a northward-oriented interplanetary magnetic field. We cross-compare the results of the four codes for a theoretical case and a MESSENGER orbit with similar upstream plasma conditions. The models agree on bowshock and magnetopause locations at 2.1 ​± ​0.11 and 1.4 ​± ​0.1 Mercury planetary radii, respectively. The latter locations may be influenced by subtle differences in the treatment of the plasma boundary at the planetary surface. The predicted magnetosheath thickness varies less between the codes. Finally, we also sample the plasma data along virtual trajectories of BepiColombo’s Magnetospheric and Planetary Orbiter. Our ability to accurately predict the structure of the Hermean magnetosphere aids the analysis of the onboard plasma measurements of past and future magnetospheric missions.

AGU fall meeting 2019 was back in San Francisco!
We had a poster presentation on Wednesday afternoon in the session of “magnetosphere in the inner solar system”

The presentation was mainly done by Willi and Léa.
Thank you to those who had a fruitful discussion with us.
We saw each other, new persons who have some interests in SHOTS came, and ready for the new scientific topic for 2020 🙂

We hope we can keep this activity and have a presentation every AGU!

On October 14–18, 2019, the Science Working Team of BepiColombo gathered for the 19th time. One year after the launch of BepiColombo, a special History session was planned, and the celebration of the 1rst anniversary of BepiColombo in space took place in the restaurant of the ESA Scientific and Technical Center (ESTEC) in the Netherlands. The Young Scientist Working group holds its now traditional session on Monday morning, including the traditional paper reviews and some scientific presentations. Go Murakami announced that the number of YSWG members is always increasing, now reaching 92 participants!

The first results of the SHOTS project were presented by Léa Griton and Sae Aizawa at the Hermean Environment Working Group. The presentation was much appreciated bu the Hermean Environment Working team. We were congratulated on several occasions during the week, notably as an example of young scientists successful and useful collaboration. The active members present at the SWT (Sae Aizawa, Jorge Amaya, Jan Deca, Léa Griton) gathered on a special session to set the draft of the first SHOTS paper. Active discussions with the other SHOTS members present (Nicolas André, Daniel Heiner, Go Murakami, and Prof. Usui) also took place on several occasions, including the social event, organized to celebrate the first anniversary of BepiColombo in space!

Young Science Working Group meeting was held in Coimbra (26-28 March, 2019) funded by Europlanet.

Sae, Willi, Shahab, Go-san, Daniel were there and gave some talks.

At the time, 1st Open meeting was also announced to all.
Since “Young Scientists” gathered there, we had an intense discussion and we built a science issue list based on the discussion.

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.

Some SHOTS members attended the 18th BepiColombo SWT meeting in Tokyo.

We had two talks related to our activity, one is the introduction of SHOTS at Young Scientist WG (YSWG) and the other one is about visualization tool at Hermean Environment WG (HEWG).
We got a lot of questions, comments, and suggestions.

All we appreciate their fruitful discussion!