Table of Contents

MMO-PWI/SORBET Wiki

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Overview of the receivers in the PME Chassis are described in Sec. 3.3 of Kasaba et al. (2020).

Inside of the spacecraft, the PWI receivers are installed in a single chassis called PME (PWI-MGF Electronics Box). The PME chassis contains the PWI receiver and controller units: EWO (EFD—Electric Field Detector, WFC—Waveform Capture, and OFA—Onboard Frequency Analyzer) with AM2P (Active Measurement of Mercury’s Plasma), SORBET (Spectroscopie Ondes Radio & Bruit Electrostatique Thermique, which means “spectroscopy of radio waves and thermal electrostatic noise”), and MEFISTO-E.

The SORBET covers the high-frequency range using two main functions, which correspond to distinct frequency ranges and scientific objectives. One is the Thermal Noise Receiver (TNR), which is primarily designed for measuring in-situ electronic moments in the Hermean plasma environment and the solar wind using the quasi-thermal noise (QTN) spectroscopy technique (cf. Moncuquet et al. 2006; Meyer-Vernet et al. 2017. This technique requires continuous measurement of the power spectra around the electron plasma frequency in the range from 2.5 to 640 kHz (called the TNR range hereafter). The SORBET has two synchronized channels in the TNR range. One channel is connected to an electric dipole antenna (WPT in the nominal mode) to perform QTN analysis. The other channel receives either another electric antenna (MEFISTO in the nominal mode) or the magnetic field sensor (DB-SC(H)). The measured voltage in the two channels is converted into a power spectrum and their cross-correlation by a wavelet-like method in the onboard FPGA. Another SORBET function serves to observe the radio waves from the Sun and around the Hermean plasma environment for electric fields in the range from 500 kHz to 10 MHz (called High-Frequency Receiver (HFR) range hereafter) and for magnetic field in the range from 2.5 kHz to 640 kHz (TNR range). Note that the HFR scan also operates on this shared channel, and can thus be connected to only one dipole antenna, which can be either WPT or MEFISTO depending on the operating mode.

More details of the SORBET receiver are described in Sec. 6 of Kasaba et al. (2020).

Members

PWI/SORBET Instrument Team

Name Affiliation ORCID
Yasumasa Kasaba PI Tohoku University, Japan https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8160-3553
Karine Issautier Co-PI LIRA Observatoire de Paris, France https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2757-101X

Mio-Science Center / Point of Contact for the PWI/SORBET data

Name Affiliation ORCID
Naritoshi Kitamura POC Nagoya University, Japan https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2397-273X
Yoshizumi Miyoshi Nagoya University, Japan https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7998-1240

Dataset references (DOI and data catalog)

Rules of the Road for Data Users

Level-1 prime data

Level-2 data

Level-3 data

Updates on Instrument Status, Data, and Any Notes

Instrument Specifications

Data Version History

Calibration Information

Science Data Products

File name convention for L2 data files

Coordinates for L2 data