After the two NASA exploratory missions Mariner 10 and MESSENGER, Mercury remains the less known solid planet of our solar system. The Hermean environment will soon be further explored by the joint ESA-JAXA BepiColombo mission, now in cruise towards Mercury. While the Hermean magnetosphere is intrinsically controlled by small-scales kinetic processes, global modellings of Mercury have been mostly provided up to now through fluid or hybrid models by neglecting (i) the electron physics and (ii) multi-scale processes. This choice was justified for past missions which focused on large-scale, low frequency, ion physics. Instead, BepiColombo aims at giving a global, multi-scale understanding of Mercury. Indeed, it will give access for the first time to small-scale (down to electron scales), high frequency measurements thanks to a complementary set of experiments carried by the two BepiColombo scientific spacecraft MPO and Mio. In order to understand this novel physics at Mercury targeted by the BepiColombo mission, a new generation of global models is required to provide a physical framework that will allow to support the upcoming analysis of multi-spacecraft (MPO and Mio) measurements. This is the goal of this co-funded PhD research project, which aims at providing, for the first time, a self-consistent global modelling of Mercury’s multi-scale magnetosphere, from ion to electron scales. This new model will then enable to investigate (i) the global structure and the dynamics of Mercury ionized and magnetized environment, as well as (ii) its interaction with the solar wind, and (iii) provide the context to study the dynamics of dust dynamics in this environment. Such goal will be achieved by means of 3D, high resolution, global numerical simulations of the interaction of the solar wind with Mercury, using and extending the state-of-the-art full kinetic model IPIC3D, successfully used recently for global modelling of comet CG/67P in support to Rosetta.
