Hi Steve,

I'm not entirely sure what you are asking. There are many spacecraft that orbit around the Sun, but I think what you want to know is if NASA is planning to launch spacecraft to study the Sun. Right?

There are plans to launch a mission called STEREO (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory) in February 2006. STEREO is a two-year mission consisting of two nearly identical space-based observatories to provide the first-ever, 3-D stereoscopic images to study the nature of coronal mass ejections, or CMEs. For more information about STEREO, go to http://stereo.jhuapl.edu/

There have been several other spacecraft missions launched in recent years to study the Sun. One called Ulysses ( http://ulysses.jpl.nasa.gov/ ) was a joint mission of NASA and the European Space Agency. This spacecraft was placed into a special orbit that carries it over the poles of the Sun by using Jupiter's gravity. This was the first spacecraft to orbit the Sun out of the ecliptic plane - the plane in which all of the planets orbit.

The SOHO spacecraft ( http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/ ) has provided lots of new information about coronal mass ejections (CMEs). If you have seen images of coronal mass ejections on the news or in magazines, chances are they came from this spacecraft.

The TRACE spacecraft ( http://trace.lmsal.com/ ) was launched to provide very detailed close-up views of the plasma and magnetic field structures in the solar corona.

All of these spacecraft study the Sun from far away by using special cameras and telescopes to make images of the Sun's outermost layers. We can't send spacecraft too close to the Sun because the high temperatures and intense radiation close to the Sun would destroy a spacecraft very quickly.

I hope that this answers your question.

Kris