Mission to the Sun

It's no manned flight to Mars, but NASA's planned solar mission is shaping up to be pretty damn exciting. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University finally came up with a viable spacecraft which will be able to safely orbit within 4.1 million miles of our local star--about a tenth of Mercury's orbit. It'll protect itself from heat and radiation with a carbon composite heat shield. I haven't been able to find any details as to what exactly the probe will research, but I'm hoping we'll get some pictures of that tiny brown dot where Superman flung all the Earth's nuclear weapons. Also, I'm hoping this mission doesn't have as disappointing an ending as Danny Boyle's Sunshine. (Slightly) more details here.