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The ESA-JAXA BepiColombo mission will provide simultaneous measurements from two spacecraft, offering an unprecedented opportunity to investigate magnetospheric and exospheric dynamics at Mercury as well as their interactions with the solar wind, radiation, and interplanetary dust. Many scientific instruments onboard the two spacecraft will be completely, or partially devoted to study the near-space environment of Mercury as well as the complex processes that govern it. Many issues remain unsolved even after the MESSENGER mission that ended in 2015. The specific orbits of the two spacecraft, MPO and Mio, and the comprehensive scientific payload allow a wider range of scientific questions to be addressed than those that could be achieved by the individual instruments acting alone, or by previous missions. These joint observations are of key importance because many phenomena in Mercury's environment are highly temporally and spatially variable. Examples of possible coordinated observations are described in this article, analysing the required geometrical conditions, pointing, resolutions and operation timing of different BepiColombo instruments sensors., Comment: 78 pages, 14 figures, published

The k-filtering/wave telescope method has been successfully applied to the four-spacecraft measurements from Cluster II and MMS, revealing the four-dimensional power spectral density $\textrm{PSD}(\omega, \mathbf k)$. As the number of spacecraft within a constellation increases, the geometry becomes more complicated, and it is harder to find the first-Brillouin-like zone, since we cannot use known formulas to calculate the geometry of the zone. To our knowledge, a quantitative study on the aliasing effects as well as the geometry of the first-Brillouin-like zone for the constellation with more than 4 spacecraft has not been proposed yet. Herewith we provide a method to estimate and compare the geometry of the first-Brillouin-like zone in multi-spacecraft constellations. The corresponding array of reciprocal lattice in the wavevector space forms the Brillouin zone. We set the preset PSDs conforming to the ``slab-only' and ``slab + 2D' patterns as the benchmark, and compare them with the reconstructed PSDs using 4, 5, and 9 virtual spacecraft. Our results validates the estimation of the Brillouin-like zones. The method may provide a constraint of aliasing effects. Our proposed method may be useful for the design and analysis of future exploration sessions with multi-spacecraft constellation., Comment: Submitted to JGR

The degree of deviation from the thermodynamic equilibrium in the ion velocity distribution functions (VDFs), measured by the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission in the Earth's turbulent magnetosheath, is quantitatively investigated. Taking advantage of MMS ion data, having a resolution never reached before in space missions, and of the comparison with Vlasov-Maxwell simulations, this analysis aims at relating any deviation from Maxwellian equilibrium to typical plasma parameters. Correlations of the non-Maxwellian features with plasma quantities such as electric fields, ion temperature, current density and ion vorticity are very similar in both magnetosheath data and numerical experiments, and suggest that distortions in the ion VDFs occur close to (but not exactly at) peaks in current density and ion temperature. Similar results have also been found during a magnetopause crossing by MMS. This work could help clarifying the origin of distortion of the ion VDFs in space plasmas.

Collisionless space plasma turbulence can generate reconnecting thin current sheets as suggested by recent results of numerical magnetohydrodynamic simulations. The MMS mission provides the first serious opportunity to check if small ion-electron-scale reconnection, generated by turbulence, resembles the reconnection events frequently observed in the magnetotail or at the magnetopause. Here we investigate field and particle observations obtained by the MMS fleet in the turbulent terrestrial magnetosheath behind quasi-parallel bow shock geometry. We observe multiple small-scale current sheets during the event and present a detailed look of one of the detected structures. The emergence of thin current sheets can lead to electron scale structures where ions are demagnetized. Within the selected structure we see signatures of ion demagnetization, electron jets, electron heating and agyrotropy suggesting that MMS spacecraft observe reconnection at these scales.

We apply a particular form of the inverse scattering theory to turbulent magnetic fluctuations in a plasma. In the present note we develop the theory, formulate the magnetic fluctuation problem in terms of its electrodynamic turbulent response function, and reduce it to the solution of a special form of the famous Gel$'$fand-Levitan-Marchenko equation of quantum mechanical scattering theory., Comment: 16 pages, no figures, theory paper

Some differences between theoretical, numerical and observational determinations of spectral slopes of solar wind turbulence are interpreted in the thermodynamical sense. Confirmations of turbulent Kolmogorov slopes in solar wind magnetic turbulence and magnetohydrodynamic simulations exhibit tiny differences. These are used to infer about entropy generation in the turbulent cascade and to infer about the anomalous turbulent collision frequency in the dissipative range as well as the average energy input in solar wind turbulence. Anomalous turbulent collision frequencies are obtained of the order of v < 200 Hz. The corresponding stationary solar wind magnetic energy input into magnetic turbulence in the Kolmogorov inertial range is obtained to be of the order of 50 eV/s. Its thermal fate is discussed., Comment: 9 pages, 1 figure, not submitted to journal

Unconditional and conditional statistics is used for studying the histograms of magnetic field multi-scale fluctuations in the solar wind near the solar cycle minimum in 2008. The unconditional statistics involves the magnetic data during the whole year 2008. The conditional statistics involves the magnetic field time series splitted into concatenated subsets of data according to a threshold in dynamic pressure. The threshold separates fast stream leading edge compressional and trailing edge uncompressional fluctuations. The histograms obtained from these data sets are associated with both large-scale (B) and small-scale ({\delta}B) magnetic fluctuations, the latter corresponding to time-delayed differences. It is shown here that, by keeping flexibility but avoiding the unnecessary redundancy in modeling, the histograms can be effectively described by a limited set of theoretical probability distribution functions (PDFs), such as the normal, log-normal, kappa and logkappa functions. In a statistical sense the model PDFs correspond to additive and multiplicative processes exhibiting correlations. It is demonstrated here that the skewed small-scale histograms inherent in turbulent cascades are better described by the skewed log-kappa than by the symmetric kappa model. Nevertheless, the observed skewness is rather small, resulting in potential difficulties of estimation of the third-order moments. This paper also investigates the dependence of the statistical convergence of PDF model parameters, goodness of fit and skewness on the data sample size. It is shown that the minimum lengths of data intervals required for the robust estimation of parameters is scale, process and model dependent., Comment: 38 pages, 8 figures, 2 tables in Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, 2015

We present a method for studying the evolution of plasma turbulence by tracking dispersion relations in the energy spectrum in the wavenumber-frequency domain. We apply hybrid plasma simulations in a simplified two-dimensional geometry to demonstrate our method and its applicability to plasma turbulence in the ion kinetic regime. We identify four dispersion relations: ion-Bernstein waves, oblique whistler waves, oblique Alfv\'en/ion-cyclotron waves, and a zero-frequency mode. The energy partition and frequency broadening are evaluated for these modes. The method allows us to determine the evolution of decaying plasma turbulence in our restricted geometry and shows that it cascades along the dispersion relations during the early phase with an increasing broadening around the dispersion relations., Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures

The time evolution of a class of completely integrable discrete Lotka-Volterra s ystem is shown not unique but have two different ways chosen randomly at every s tep of generation. This uncertainty is consistent with the existence of constant s of motion and disappears in both continuous time and ultra discrete limits., Comment: 23 pages, 2 figures