Plans have been placed for NASA to fly a spacecraft perilously close to the Sun almost Icarus-like. Solar Probe Plus will give astronomers insights into how the Sun generates such enormous heat and the workings behind the solar winds. Additionally, the mission will serve to shed some light into the evolution of life on Earth and boost further exploration of space.
The price tag for the mission is estimated to be about $1.2 billion and many space enthusiasts wonder if NASA should be spending the money on trying to colonize other worlds or figuring out how to get started doing so rather than a mission to the Sun. I feel that this is a legitimate question, but astrophysicists and NASA astronomers agree that the space probe will be worth the money spent in terms of the information that will be gleaned.
The Solar Probe Plus mission itself has taken awhile in materializing with it being an on again off again project for too long. There was also a debate on how to run the spacecraft with ideas of launching it in the direction of Jupiter so that the gas giant could propel it towards out Star and thereby save energy.
The decision has been to swing the space probe a few times around Venus and finally let it go towards the Sun to go around the star’s middle. The observatory material that will allow astronomers to look at almost 100 million miles of the Solar System will be a little cup sized object. It is a chest-high shelf of electronics that will fit nicely in a shoebox.