MESSENGER Magnetospheric Boundary Encounters

Description Dataset of MESSENGER magnetopause and bow shock boundary encounter times at Mercury, spanning the entire MESSENGER orbital mission from March 2011 to April 2015. Each entry records the start and end time of a boundary encounter, the type of boundary (magnetopause or bow shock, inbound or outbound), the encounter duration, and the associated orbit number. This list was derived from the Hollman (2026) MESSENGER boundary crossing catalogue (https://zenodo.org/records/21392216), which provides a set of magnetopause and bow shock crossing intervals for the full MESSENGER mission based on magnetometer data collected using machine learning methods. The crossings in that catalogue were programmatically parsed and reformatted into the orbit-indexed structure below, with each crossing assigned to its corresponding orbit number to allow orbit-by-orbit analysis of Mercury's magnetospheric boundary locations. Data Column Description Column name Description Time Start Timestamp of the start of the boundary crossing interval, in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), format YYYY-MM-DD Hour:Minute:Second Time End Timestamp of the end of the boundary crossing interval, in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), format YYYY-MM-DD Hour:Minute:Second. Equal to Time Start where the crossing was resolved as instantaneous. Label Type of boundary crossing. One of: BSI (Bow Shock Inbound), BSO (Bow Shock Outbound), MPI (Magnetopause Inbound), MPO (Magnetopause Outbound), UNI (Unclassified crossing, Inbound), UNO (Unclassified crossing, Outbound) Encounter Duration Duration of the crossing interval, in hours (Time End − Time Start). When 0, it means the encounter was instantaneous, and it only contained one crossing. Orbit Number Orbit number of the MESSENGER spacecraft during which the crossing occurred, indexed against the mission's periapsis/apoapsis sequence This data was constructed using the Hollman (2026) MESSENGER boundary crossing list and the hermpy Python package (https://github.com/daraghhollman/hermpy). The code used to generate this list can be found in the code/src/hermpymod/functions/encounters.py file of this GitHub repository (https://github.com/odanny-oc/DIASMercuryMagnetosphere).