Wikipedia
Sundiver is a 1980 science fiction novel by David Brin. It is the first book of his Uplift trilogy, and was followed by the Hugo and Nebula award winning novel Startide Rising in 1983.
Sundiver is a proposed space mission to crash a probe into the Sun, sending back data to Earth before burning up. It has been proposed as a design study by the Australian Academy of Science's National Committee for Space Science as a Flagship mission to kick-start an Australian space program. The design study is proposed as a five-year study from 2011-2015 with a complement of 10 PhDs, budgeted at a cost of $10 M (Australian), leading to a Go/NoGo Decision in 2015.
The mission would be comparable in its close approach to the Sun to the NASA Solar Probe Plus mission, although it would only make a single pass into the solar corona.