Abstract
Previous studies suggested that Mercury’s terrestrial-like magnetosphere
could possess Earth-like field-aligned currents (FACs) despite having no
ionosphere. However, due to the limited coverage of spacecraft
observations, our knowledge about Mercury’s FACs is scarce. Here, to
survey the establishment and global pattern of Mercury’s FACs, we used
Amitis, a hybrid-kinetic plasma model, to simulate the response of
Mercury’s FACs to different interior conductivity profiles and various
orientations of the upstream interplanetary magnetic field (IMF). We
find that the planet with a conductive interior favors the establishment
of FACs, and that IMF orientation controls the pattern of FACs in a
similar manner as it does on Earth. But the response of R2-like FACs to
IMF orientation differs, thus we cannot simply regard Mercury’s FACs as
a scaled-down version of Earth’s. Comparison between our simulations and
the previous data analysis suggests that the effective interior
conductance to close Mercury’s FACs is ~2.4-3.4 S.