This repository details the progress on the analysis of magnetospheric boundary crossings by the MESSENGER spacecraft at Mercury from 2011 to 2015.
Be sure to have all the dependencies installed
- Python
- pyqt6 (wayland)
To get started, clone the repository using the link
git clone https://github.com/odanny-oc/DIASMercuryMagnetosphere.git
It is recommended to create a virtual environment inside the repository to download the requirements. To do this cd into the repository and run
cd DIASMercuryMagnetosphere
python -m venv .venv
To access the Python virtual environment, run
source .venv/bin/activate
All the Python dependencies can be installed from the requirements.txt file in the code directory. To properly install the custom packages, run
cd code
pip install -r requirements.txt
Once completed, the code, which all sits in the code directory, can be run from the terminal using
python /path/to/file
For each directory in the code directory, there are READMEs which describe what the code does and how it is used.
This repository is a collection of code that produces the analysis of the Hollman et al. crossing list 2026 (https://zenodo.org/records/21392216). A detailed README can be found within each directory explaining how each file works. The analysis largely pertains to crossings and encounters of magnetospheric boundaries of Mercury. There are two magnetospheric boundaries at Mercury, the magnetopause (MP), and the bow shock (BS). The bow shock is defined as the boundary where particles in the solar wind are suddenly decelerated after first coming into contact with the magnetic field of Mercury. The magnetopause, which sits beyond the bow shock, is where the magnetic pressure of the Sun's magnetic field equalises with Mercury's. This gives rise to three regions, the solar wind, the magnetosheath, and the magnetosphere.
A crossing, which is taken from the Hollman et al. dataset, is the moment when the spacecraft passes from one region to another. These then come with four different labels, magnetopause in (MP_IN), magnetopause out (MP_OUT), bow shock in (BS_IN), and bow shock out (BS_OUT). As the boundaries are quite variable, single crossings can be uncommon. Therefore, a useful way to characterise boundaries is using encounters. An encounter is a collection of crossings associated with one traversal of a boundary. The encounters code and functions use the Hollman et al. dataset to group the crossings by their encounters.