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OATS-DAUT SEMINAR
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Speaker:
François Leblanc (Service d'Aèronomie-CNRS-IPSL, Verrières-le-Buisson)
Title:
Mercury's atmosphere
Date: Wednesday, October 10th, 2007
Time: 12:00
Venue: Villa Bazzoni
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Abstract: MESSENGER is a US discovery mission that has been
launched towards Mercury in August 2004 and will make its first flyby
of Mercury in January 2008 for an orbit insertion in 2011. In the same
time, the European SA is preparing Bepi Colombo a corner stone mission
in collaboration with the Japan to be launched in August 2013 for an
insertion around Mercury in 2019. Before these two missions, only one
spacecraft, Mariner 10, made three flybys of Mercury 30 years
ago. Mariner 10 has in particular revealed the unexpected presence of
an intrinsic magnetic field and highlighted the presence of a thin
atmosphere. Almost 10 years after Mariner 10 flybys, ground based
observations have shown the possibility to probe Mercury's atmosphere
from Earth. In 2001, the University of Padova has started a long term
program of observations of this atmosphere using the Telescopio
Nazionale Galileo and SARG an echelle spectrograph that we have later
extended to the French-Italian solar telescope Themis as well as to
international campaign. In this presentation, I will summarize the
state of the art of our understanding of Mercury's atmosphere and the
goals and achievements of my collaboration with the University of
Padova.
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