The Ulysses spacecraft is orbiting the Sun on a highly inclined ellipse ( i = 79 ^ { \circ } , perihelion distance 1.3 AU , aphelion distance 5.4 AU ) .
Between January 1996 and December 1999 the spacecraft was beyond 3 AU from the Sun and crossed the ecliptic plane at aphelion in May 1998 .
In this four-year period 218 dust impacts were recorded with the dust detector on board .
We publish and analyse the complete data set of both raw and reduced data for particles with masses 10 ^ { -16 } g to 10 ^ { -8 } g. Together with 1477 dust impacts recorded between launch of Ulysses and the end of 1995 published earlier [ ] , a data set of 1695 dust impacts detected with the Ulysses sensor between October 1990 and December 1999 is now available .
The impact rate measured between 1996 and 1999 was relatively constant with about 0.2 impacts per day .
The impact direction of the majority of the impacts is compatible with particles of interstellar origin , the rest are most likely interplanetary particles .
The observed impact rate is compared with a model for the flux of interstellar dust particles .
The flux of particles several micrometers in size is compared with the measurements of the dust instruments on board Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 beyond 3 AU ( Humes 1980 , JGR , 85 , 5841–5852 , 1980 ) .
Between 3 and 5 AU , Pioneer results predict that Ulysses should have seen five times more ( \sim 10 \mu m sized ) particles than actually detected .