Micro-meteoroids impact vaporization (MMIV) on Mercury surface

For airless bodies as Mercury, meteoroids hit their surfaces directly, producing impact debris and contributing to shape their thin exospheres. The ESA BepiColombo mission will study Mercury in details by orbiting around the planet starting from 2025. It is important to study the planet exospheric density and to develop a modelling tool for testing hypothesis on the release mechanism and interpreting future observational data. In this work, a prototype of the Virtual Activity SPIDER (Sun-Planet Interactions Digital Environment on Request) services is used as a Monte Carlo three-dimensional model of the Hermean exosphere to simulate the bombardment of surface by MicroMeteroid from different souces. We study how the impact vapor varies with heliocentric distance and the high impact velocity of these particles, demonstrating a persistent enhancement of the dust/meteoroid at dawn, which should be responsible of the dawn–dusk asymmetry in Mercury’s Ca exosphere The Sun Planet Interactions Digital Environment on Request (SPIDER) Virtual Activity of the Europlanet H2024 Research Infrastucture is funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 871149.