The Capon Method for Mercury's Magnetic Field Analysis

Abstract

Characterization of Mercury's internal and external magnetic field is one of the primary goals of the magnetometer experiment on board the BepiColombo MPO (Mercury Planetary Orbiter) spacecraft. A novel data analysis tool is developed to determine the Gauss coefficients in the multipole expansion using Capon's minimum variance projection method. The construction of the estimator is presented along with a test against the numerical simulation data of Mercury's magnetosphere and a comparison with the least square fitting method shows, that Capon's estimator is in better agreement with the coefficients, implemented in the simulation, than the least square fit estimator.