Disturbances in Mercury's magnetosphere: Are the mariner 10 "substorms" simply driven?

In addition to providing the first in situ evidence of a magnetosphere at Mercury, the first flyby by Mariner 10 inspired reports of Earth-like substorms. While the small scales at Mercury should make the substorm timescale there much shorter than it is at the Earth, these early interpretations may have too readily assumed that the substorm requirement of an energy storage and release phase occurs. Instead, its size should make Mercury's magnetosphere especially prone to disturbances that are purely "driven" by the changing external boundary conditions on the magnetosphere imposed by the solar wind. These result simply from the magnetosphere's relatively unhindered reconfiguration in response to the varying interplanetary parameters, including the IMF southward component. In this paper we demonstrate that the "disturbed" structure observed outbound from closest approach during the first Mariner 10 flyby can alternately be explained as a consequence of a typical period of rotating IMF. We use an appropriately modified IMF-dependent terrestrial magnetosphere model scaled for Mercury, together with an assumed, reasonable IMF time series, to reproduce the magnetic field signature during the disturbed outbound pass segment. This result suggests that rapid restructuring of the small magnetosphere in response to changing local interplanetary conditions may dominate the magnetospheric dynamics at Mercury. Future Mercury magnetosphere missions should be instrumented to distinguish between this driven magnetospheric dynamism and any internal Earth-like substorm processes. These results also remind us that driven reconfigurations must always be considered in studies of transients in the terrestrial magnetosphere.