The BepiColombo Mission to Explore Planet Mercury: Science Capabilities and Goals of the joint ESA and JAXA dual Spacecraft Mission

About

Dr Johannes Benkhoff is a planetary physicist working in the field of computational modeling of the physics and chemistry of planetary bodies and comets. He got his PhD in 1992 at University of Münster Germany. He obtained a scholarship from the German Science Foundation (DFG) to work for three years as a post-doc with Prof. Dr. Huebner at the SwRI institute in Texas USA. After that he worked as a research scientist at the German Aerospace Centre DLR before he moved in 2004 to the European Space Agency ESA-ESTEC in Noorwijk Netherlands. He was CoI on Rosetta VIRTIS and MUPUS CoI on the NASA Contour mission and CoI on Venus Express. Since 2008 he is the ESA project scientist of the L class (cornerstone) mission BepiColombo operated in close collaboration with the Japanese Space Agency JAXA.   Dr Go Murakami is an Assistant Professor working at Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) in Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). He is the Project Scientist of the ESA-JAXA joint mission BepiColombo for Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter: Mio. His science expertise is solar terrestrial plasma physics and planetary atmospheric science. He got his Ph.D by The University of Tokyo in 2011. Then he worked at JAXA/ISAS as a research fellow between 2011-2017 for developments and observations of Japanese ultraviolet space telescope Hisaki and the BepiColombo mission. In 2017 he got the current position at JAXA/ISAS.   Prof. Dr Ayako Matsuoka is the Director of Data Analysis Center for Geomagnetism and Space Magnetism Graduate School of Science Kyoto University. She has worked on the magnetic field experiments as Principal Investigator (PI) in the Japanese NOZOMI and ARASE satellite projects Co-PI for BepiColombo MIO and Sub-PI for Martian Moon Exploration (MMX) and Comet Interceptor B1 Probe.