Our local interstellar environment is not just empty space. Our solar system is moving through
an environment that has significant elemental populations. We can reliably measure some of
these species of neutral particles through their interaction with the solar wind creating pick-up
ions that can give us insight into our local interstellar environment. One current mission that we
are using is the Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission (MMS) data with an in-situ instrument
called the Hot Plasma Compositional Analyzer (HPCA). The HPCA can measure energies of the
pick-up ions and are able to give us an idea of the compositional make-up of what gases our
solar system is moving through. We will discuss our data collection and interpretation of the
time of flight (TOF) data we gathered. One outcome we are trying to map are pockets of higher
concentrations of certain neutral elements to identify focusing cones influenced by the sun’s
magnetic deflection and solar wind interactions. With this data, we assess the feasibility of our
process and methodology for mapping these focusing cones. A majority of the information we
have for focusing cones come from data gathered about 20-80 AU, what we are looking at is
data collected at 1 AU. With further data collection and analysis, we can start getting a clearer
picture of our local space weather and make better predictions for satellites and other
equipment sent up into space.