[2][3] The mission would have supported NASA's Solar Terrestrial Probes program by studying how interplanetary space changes in response to the constant outpouring of energy and particles from the Sun and how it interacts with planetary atmospheres.
[4] The principal investigator was Les Johnson at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
[3] The mission had been selected to launch along with NASA's Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) and Global Lyman-alpha Imagers of the Dynamic Exosphere (GLIDE).
[2] The Solar Cruiser spacecraft would have demonstrated solar sailing around the Sun at an unusual polar orbit, while its coronagraph instrument would enable simultaneous measurements of the Sun's magnetic field structure and velocity of coronal mass ejections.
Previously, US$400,000 for nine-month mission concept studies was presented to the Heliophysics Solar Terrestrial Probes program, which is managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.