There really is a plan for an unmanned mission to Sol 'at night', by following in the occlusion shadow of a close-approach asteroid.
I've heard rumors that they've also been playing around with an idea similar to the solar bathysphere from Sundiver: a unmanned shallow-dive probe into the corona, using Peltier junctions to cool and power the probe, perhaps using an external laser to shed excess electrical energy. The intention is to keep the probe cooled for as long as possible, hopefully until it's orbit decayed entirely. This is just at the stage of speculation, though. I don't know if the thermodynamics would work, though I assume that anyone working on the idea would have checked that out from the start. |
