***********************************************************
OATS-DAUT SEMINAR
***********************************************************
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

***********************************************************
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.
***********************************************************