Simulating Mercury’s Energetic Neutral Atom Environment
Paul Szabo, Research Scientist
Space Sciences Laboratory
Applications for Spring 2026 are closed for this project.
The surface of Mercury is continuously exposed to ions from the solar wind and its own magnetosphere. Upon impact, these ions alter Mercury’s surface, cause surface erosion, and contribute to the formation of water. Mercury’s intrinsic global magnetic field and its interaction with the solar wind plasma stream make this interaction highly variable and challenging to estimate.
Some of the protons that hit the surface are scattered away as neutral hydrogen atoms. We have observed this process at the Moon, and it is similarly expected to occur at Mercury. ESA’s upcoming BepiColombo mission is equipped with two instruments that aim to study energetic atoms coming from the surface of Mercury to better constrain how much ion flux the planet’s surface is exposed to. This will not only allow us to better understand how much the surface is altered through ion impacts, but will also help characterize Mercury’s magnetosphere.
This project entails developing a predictive model of future BepiColombo observations, combining existing simulation results of Mercury’s magnetosphere and the ion-surface interaction for different scenarios. The model will ultimately be used to study which effects will be observed by BepiColombo’s instruments and how BepiColombo measurements can be leveraged to test different models of the magnetosphere and its interaction with the surface.
Role: As a student researcher, your main task will be writing a program that uses data from a simulation of ion impacts on the surface of Mercury and calculates expected signals of the two BepiColombo instruments for different scenarios involving parameters of the solar wind or the surface.
While representing the starting point, the research project is not necessarily limited to this task. Further opportunities for research could include, for example, numerical simulations of the microscopic interaction of the solar wind with Mercury's porous surface.
Qualifications: We are looking for highly motivated students who are interested in space research and want to learn more about planetary science. The ability to work independently as well as showing engagement in learning about the scientific background of the project are important. Programming experience in Python is required, including data analysis and visualization packages such as NumPy and Matplotlib. Knowledge about planetary science, space plasma physics, or ion-surface interaction is an advantage but not required.
The research work should be done in-person at the Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL) for the first month. After that, it can be done either in-person or primarily remote with weekly in-person meetings at SSL. SSL can be reached from campus in around 15 minutes with the free UC Berkeley Hill Shuttle.
Hours: 9-11 hrs
Related website: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=6y5QLu0AAAAJ&hl=en
Related website: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=6y5QLu0AAAAJ&hl=en