Mercury’s Sodium Exosphere: Anab initioCalculation to InterpretMASCS/UVVS Observations from MESSENGER

The optical spectroscopy measurements of sodium in Mercury’s exosphere by MESSENGER MASCS/UVVS have been interpreted before with a model employing two exospheric components of different temperatures. Here we use an updated version of the Monte Carlo (MC) exosphere model developed by Wurz and Lammer (2003) to calculate the Na content of the exosphere for the observation conditions. In addition, we compare our results to the ones according to Chamberlain theory. Studying several release 5 mechanisms, we find that close to the surface thermal desorption dominates driven by a surface temperature of 594 K, whereas at higher altitudes micro-meteorite impact vaporization prevails with a characteristic energy of 0.34 eV. From the surface up to 500 km the MC model results agree with the Chamberlain model, and both agree well with the observations. At higher altitudes, the MC model using micro-meteorite impact vaporization explains the observation well. We find that the combination of thermal desorption and micro-meteorite impact vaporization reproduces the observation of the 10 selected day quantitatively over the entire observed altitude range, with the calculations performed based on the prevailing environment and orbit parameters. These findings may help to improve our understanding of the physical conditions at Mercury’s exosphere, as well as to better interpret mass-spectrometry data obtained to date and in future missions, such as BepiColombo