Possible displacement of mercury's dipole

Earlier attempts to model the Hermean magnetospheric field based on a planet-centered magnetic multipole field have required the addition of a quadrupole moment to obtain a good fit to space vehicle observations. In this work we obtain an equally satisfactory fit by assuming a null quadrupole moment and least squares fitting of the displacement of the planetary dipole from the center of the planet. We find a best fit for a dipole displacement from the planet center of 0.033 R/sub m/ away from the solar direction, 0.025 R/sub m/ toward dawn in the magnetic equatorial plane, and 0.189 R/sub m/ northward along the magnetic dipole axis, where R/sub m/ is the planet radius. Therefore the presence of a magnetic quadrupole moment is not ruled out. The compressed dipole field more completely represents the field in the present work than in previous work where the intrinsic quadrupole field was not included in the magnetopause surface and field calculations. Moreover, we have corrected a programing error in previous work in the computation of dipole tilt lambda away from the sun. We find a slight increase for the planet dipole moment of 190γR/sub m/3 and a dipole tilt angle lambda away from the sun. We find a slight increase for the planet moment of 190γR/sub m/3 and a dipole tilt angle lambda of only 1.20 away from the sun. All other parameters are essentially unchanged