Coordinated measurements during the Cruise phase of BepiColombo: science cases, operational instruments and windows of opportunities

Abstract

BepiColombo (ESA/JAXA), Solar Orbiter (ESA/NASA) and Parker Solar Probe (NASA), will be all traveling in the inner heliosphere for 5 years, between the launch of Solar Orbiter (10th February 2020) and the end of the cruise phase of BepiColombo (2018 - 2025). During the five years to come, these three spacecraft missions will cover different radial distances: BepiColombo will evolve between the orbit of Mercury up to Earth (0.3 AU and 0.9 AU), while Solar Orbiter’s highly elliptical orbit will cover distances from 1.02 AU to 0.28 AU, and Parker Solar Probe from about 0.7 AU to 0.04 AU. In addition to these missions, previous and future spacecraft missions will be taking measurements in our solar system (from Venus ~ 0.7 AU till Jupiter 5 AU). The exceptional and complementary plasma instrumental payloads and magnetometers on-board the different satellites will allow us to make unique multi-point measurements in the solar wind. Hence, in this work, we present the potential coordinated observations between at least BepiColombo, Solar Orbiter and Parker Solar Probe (including also other satellites such as probes at L1, or around Venus, Mars and Jupiter). More specifically, in the first part we focus on the different scientific topic that could be studied during the cruise phase of BepiColombo, in the second part we present the related potential operational instruments and in the last part we discuss the different windows of opportunities we have investigated based on different spacecraft geometries.