MESSENGER observations of Mercury's magnetic field structure
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We present a baseline, time‐averaged model for Mercury's magnetosphere, derived from MESSENGER Magnetometer data from 24 March to 12 December 2011, comprising the spacecraft's first three Mercury years in orbit around the innermost planet. The model, constructed under the approximation that the magnetospheric shape can be represented as a paraboloid of revolution, includes two external (magnetopause and magnetotail) current systems and an internal (dipole) field and allows for reconnection. We take advantage of the geometry of the orbital Magnetometer data to estimate all but one of the model parameters, and their ranges, directly from the observations. These parameters are then used as a priori constraints in the paraboloid magnetospheric model, and the sole remaining parameter, the dipole moment, is estimated as 190 nT R M 3 from a grid search. We verify that the best fit dipole moment is insensitive to changes in the other parameters within their determined ranges. The model provides an excellent first‐order fit to the MESSENGER observations, with a root‐mean‐square misfit of less than 20 nT globally. The results show that the magnetopause field strength ranges from 10% to 50% of the dipole field strength at observation locations on the dayside and at nightside latitudes north of 60°N. Globally, the residual signatures observed to date are dominated by the results of magnetospheric processes, confirming the dynamic nature of Mercury's magnetosphere.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".