Abstract
Characterization of Mercury's internal and external magnetic field is one of the primary goals of the magnetometer experiment on board the BepiColombo MPO (Mercury Planetary Orbiter) spacecraft. A novel data analysis tool is developed to determine the Gauss coefficients in the multipole expansion using Capon's minimum variance projection method. The construction of the estimator is presented along with a test against the numerical simulation data of Mercury's magnetosphere and a comparison with the least square fitting method shows, that Capon's estimator is in better agreement with the coefficients, implemented in the simulation, than the least square fit estimator.
Highlights
The reconstruction of planetary magnetic fields is one of the most important goals of a magnetometer experiment on board an orbiting spacecraft
The weighted least square fit [3] and robust regression [4] appeared as useful methods for the analysis of Saturn’s magnetic field
In this work we present an alternative method, namely Capon’s method, for the analysis of Mercury’s internal magnetic field
Summary
The reconstruction of planetary magnetic fields is one of the most important goals of a magnetometer experiment on board an orbiting spacecraft. The Earth’s magnetic field has been analyzed among other methods by using the maximum entropy method [5] All these methods will be useful tools for Mercury’s magnetic field analysis, which is one of the primary goals of the magnetometer experiment on board the BepiColombo mission. The method was extended for the mode decomposition of magnetic fields [9] This establishes a basis to separate the planetary magnetic field from the total measured field in Mercury’s magnetosphere. Concerning to the BepiColombo mission, in this work magnetic field data resulting from the plasma interaction of Mercury with the solar wind are simulated and Capon’s method is applied to the magnetic field data to analyze Mercury’s internal magnetic field
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