Monitoring of the Interstellar Dust Stream in the Inner Solar System Using Data of Different Spacecraft

Interstellar dust plays a key role in many astrophysical processes. However, until recently, astronomers could infer some properties of interstellar dust only through observations of starlight extinction and infrared emission. Therefore, the in-situ detection of interstellar dust, based on detectors carried by spacecraft, was a major step for dust astronomy. This method showed that one can learn a lot about the interstellar medium, if one decodes the information carried by the dust grains. Goal of this work is to analyse data sets for interstellar dust, that have been collected by the interplanetary probes Helios, Galileo, Ulysses and Cassini. The analysis of the in-situ data allows us to identify interstellar dust between 0.3 AU and 5 AU. In addition, the data provide in-situ evidence for the interaction of the interstellar dust stream with the heliospheric environment. In particular, the influence of the radiation pressure and of the gravitation focusing on the interstellar dust size distribution could be measured as function of the heliocentric distance