List of Mercury's Bow Shock and Magnetopause Crossings by the MESSENGER Spacecraft

This dataset contains a list of Mercury’s bow shock and magnetopause boundary crossings by the MESSENGER spacecraft during its entire orbital mission, from March 23, 2011, to April 30, 2015. A total of 4,054 orbits were identified. The boundary crossings were visually identified by abrupt changes in the magnetic field strength and direction as the spacecraft traversed the current layer, assisted by a sharp boundary in the ion flux spectrogram between different regions. Due to the inward and outward motions of these boundaries, multiple crossings were typically observed. The dataset provides the innermost and outermost crossings for each pass. File descriptions: *MP_in.dat*: Inbound magnetopause crossings. *MP_out.dat*: Outbound magnetopause crossings. *BS_in.dat*: Inbound bow shock crossings. *BS_out.dat*: Outbound bow shock crossings. Each file includes two columns: the time strings for the first and last crossings during each pass. For passes with only one crossing, the second time string is labeled as “NAN.” In a few orbits where the bow shock was not detected, both columns are labeled as “NAN.” The MESSENGER MAG and FIPS data used for the identification is publicly available via NASA’s Planetary Data System (https://pds-ppi.igpp.ucla.edu/). This dataset is linked to the following publications: Zhong et al. (2015), Mercury’s three-dimensional asymmetric magnetopause, J. Geophy. Res. Space Physics, 120, 7658–7671, https://doi.org/10.1002/2015JA021425. Zhong et al. (2015), Compressibility of Mercury’s dayside magnetosphere, Geophy. Res. Lett., 42(23), 10135-10139. https://doi.org/10.1002/2015GL067063. Zhong et al. (2020), Effects of Orbital Eccentricity and IMF Cone Angle on the Dimensions of Mercury’s Magnetosphere, Astrophys. J., 892(1), 2. 10135-10139. https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ab7819. Zhong & Wang, Global magnetic field properties in Mercury’s solar wind interaction from MESSENGER measurements [submitted, A&A, 2024].