"Exploring Beyond the Solar System"
The solar wind carves out a large void into the surrounding interstellar plasma, the heliosphere. Because the sun moves relative to the local interstellar cloud at ~26 km/s, an interstellar wind of neutral gas blows through our solar system, and in spite of the size of the heliosphere we have already access to in-situ sampling of interstellar matter. This surrounding interstellar cloud contains an accessible sample of cosmic material that does not belong to our solar system and therefore presents a window into the evolution of galactic matter. Great progress in determining parameters and composition of this local interstellar material and its interaction with the heliosphere has been made by utilizing pickup ions and direct neutral gas imaging. Recent progress with low energy neutral atom instrumentation will allow further breakthroughs in the understanding of the interaction of the heliosphere with its neighborhood.