Specification of cost for activities for BepiColombo/MEFISTO

ESA’s cornerstone project BepiColombo includes two spacecraft, the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO), and the Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO).

We contribute with the MEFISTO instrument to the Plasma Wave Investigation (PWI) payload suite lead by Kyoto University and on board the Japanese (JAXA) lead MMO spacecraft.

The PWI will observe both waveforms and frequency spectra in the frequency range from DC to 10 MHz (electric field) and from 0.3 Hz to 640 kHz (magnetic field), and PWI is therefore a complete field and wave instrument suite.

MEFISTO will make the first-ever in-situ measurements of static and low frequency electric fields in Mercury’s environment.Jan-Erik Wahlund (IRFU) is one of the four PWI Co-Principal Investigators, and Tomas Karlsson (KTH) is a Lead CoI for MEFISTO.

The MEFISTO flight hardware, developed and manufactured at KTH and IRFU, is on-board BepiColombo that was successfully launched in 2018 and will arrive at Mercury in late 2025.

The science phase in orbit around Mercury is planned to last at least one year starting 2026.The overall scientific goal of our team is to identify, model and understand the main processes in space plasma around Mercury and its role in the interaction with the surface. The magnetosphere of Mercury is continuously exposed to the strong and dynamic solar wind flow near the Sun.

The absence of a conductive ionosphere and the massive emission of photoelectrons on the dayside give rise to interesting problems concerning the closure of the electric currents.This application concerns support for MEFISTO operations and data archiving (ground segment), including a plan for operation cost until mission end in 2027.