Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
perigee of 250 km, an apogee of 6.6 R
E
, and an inclination of 10
◦
.Itspro-
posed instrument payload includes
B
-and
E
-field sensors, electron and ion
analyzers with continuous energy coverage from a few eV to MeV, to cap-
ture the instability and acceleration processes in the radiation belt directly.
The launch date is not fixed yet, but we hope to realize this mission in early
2010s.
The SCOPE mission will be a full-scale “Post-MMS (Smart)” formation
flight satellite mission, aiming to probe processes of a variety of spatial
and temporal scales, from the scales of electron and ion gyro-radius and
inertial lengths, to MHD scales. It is conceived as a constellation of a mother
spacecraft and four daughter spacecraft, one of which will be separated by
5-100 km from the mother spacecraft and the other three 5-5,000 km away.
The orbit will have a perigee near 7,000 km and an apogee of 30 R
E
. This will
provide ample opportunities to study regions of dayside/nightside magnetic
reconnection, shocks, and many kinds of highly non-linear processes.
3.2.2.
Detailed studies for Mars and Venus
The mission following BepiColombo is not fixed yet. A “Nozomi recovery
mission” to Mars is debated.
Since the unexpected termination of the Nozomi mission in 2003, no
other spacecraft with a primary focus on the planetary atmosphere's inter-
action with the solar wind has been sent to Mars. Therefore, numerous
intrinsic questions about the Martian upper atmosphere are still open. The
next Mars mission is now being extensively discussed mostly from a scien-
tific point of view, including the objectives proposed in the Nozomi mission.
In particular, elucidation of the atmospheric escape process and its impact
on atmospheric evolution will be one of the most important subjects.
Studies of the Venusian atmosphere “Post-VCO” are also under study,
involving the combination of imaging using wide field of view cameras like
VCO and
in situ
observations by airplane or balloon experiments. The
possible Venus balloon missions will explore the lower atmosphere of Venus
below the main cloud layer. The balloon under consideration is a superpres-
sure type using water vapor as the lifting gas, aiming to float at an altitude
lower than 40 km for more than a few weeks. Such a balloon will enable
meteorological measurements, identification of haze particles below clouds,
and optical sounding of the ground surface at wavelengths in the near-
infrared atmospheric windows. Key technologies will be high-temperature
electronics including local oscillators, batteries, and solar cell arrays.
