[frankinstien]

Here are some articles on the Parker Solar Probe, it actually has and will continue to collect material from the Sun's corona until its final approach in 2025!

[MagnusWootton]

So the sun is god, and its a super human robot!

[LOCKSUIT]

I found this link also interesting on the ship's build design to withstand heat:
https://physics.aps.org/articles/v14/176

Like iphones and/or intel processors, NUWA by Microsoft, and UE4/5, these things are just really advanced and far out, lots of research goes on and lots of steps.

[infurl]

That heat shield solution was depicted on a large scale in the Danny Boyle science fiction movie "Sunshine". It was pretty good from a technical perspective but got a bit silly towards the end.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_(2007_film)

An even more interesting method was described in David Brin's first book "Sundiver" which incredible as it was, was scientifically sound. David Brin is an astrophysicist who specialised in solar physics. He described a ship cooled by a heat pump which disposed of the massive amounts of excess energy by beaming them away from the ship with an X-ray laser.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundiver

Another fantastic method of cooling a ship so it could explore the inside of the sun was described in the book "Ring" by the physicist Stephen Baxter. This ship carries one end of a wormhole with it; excess heat is pumped into the wormhole and radiates from the other end which orbits the sun near Mercury.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_(Baxter_novel)

[LOCKSUIT]

It's moving at 400,000 miles per hour = 111 miles per second.

Earth has a circumference of 24.859.73 mi / 40.007.86 km

so, ~200 seconds to go around earth

"Earth is 24,901 miles around at its center. If our world had no atmosphere (air refracts and slows down light a little bit), a photon skimming along its surface could lap the equator nearly 7.5 times every second.Jan 17, 2019"

so, ~200 * 7.5 = 1,500 times slower than light

[HS]

Those are some really cool ideas, no pun intended… I'm always amazed by this stuff, brings back the good old days of watching the discovery channel 24/7 on summer breaks. It may have been even before I started thinking about AI, that I had dreams about building various space ships, and artificial gravity, and all-terrain planetary exploration vehicles. Recently I've been thinking that I could combine some of this with my ideas about AI. I mean, Imagine Space Blinky!!! Anyways back to Earth.

Let's see, what kind of design ideas would I try for a solar probe? How about a triangular prism, so that at any time only one side faced the sun and absorbed radiation, while three faces radiated heat into space? This could rotate whenever the triangle facing the sun reached a certain temperature. Any necessary heat pumps or inertial rotation wheels could be powered by temperature gradients between the four surfaces!