This will enable missions ten to hundreds of times further than Pluto out to the Kuiper Belt Objects or interstellar space.

A solar slingshot maneuver is to fly as close as possible to the sun in order to get more speed. A gravity assist around a Sun changes a spacecraft's velocity by entering and leaving the gravitational sphere. The spacecraft's speed increases as it approaches the sun departs in the opposite direction.

The team has designed and built working solar thermal propulsion prototypes out of materials that can survive 2800 K at a 20 x 20 cm scale. These benchtop-scale demonstrations have thus far validated our thermal and propulsion models. Despite growing confidence that a full-scale heat shield/heat exchanger can survive an Oberth maneuver (solar slingshot), many questions remain regarding the feasibility of long-term cryogenic storage.

The goal is for the craft to move within 1.6 million kilometers of the Sun's surface. This is four times closer than the Parker Solar Probe plans to reach by 2025. In a 2021 article in Johns Hopkins Magazine, Benkoski explained the concept, which will preserve the heat shield by using channels filled with hydrogen gas (or other gas) that are built into the bulk of the shield itself. Absorb heat with coolant gas and shoot it out of the probe as an engine burn as they are leaving the sun. The cooling setup also opportunistically doubles as an engine.