"Project Icarus: How to Navigate Interstellar Space" | 'Sunshine' Film Inspires After All - Case & Point - Tau Zero Foundation and British Interplanetary Society

"Project Icarus is an ambitious five-year study into launching an unmanned spacecraft to an interstellar destination. Headed by the Tau Zero Foundation and British Interplanetary Society, a non-profit group of scientists dedicated to interstellar spaceflight, Icarus is working to develop a spacecraft that can travel to a nearby star.
Rob Swinney, member of the British Interplanetary Society and Project Icarus, investigates the realities of navigating through interstellar space with a vehicle traveling at 12 percent the speed of light."

http://news.discovery.com/space/project-icarus-navigating-interstellar-space-110707.html 

Sunshine (2007 film)

"In 2057, the failure of the Earth's Sun threatens life on the planet, compelling humanity to send a spacecraft that carries a stellar bomb payload intended to re-ignite it. The first spacecraft with the payload, the Icarus I, was lost seven years previously for reasons unknown, having failed in its mission. A second spacecraft with a new payload, the Icarus II, is sent to the Sun in a final attempt, as the Earth has been exhausted of the materials necessary to make the payload.
The design of the Icarus spacecraft, displayed in the opening shots of the movie, incorporates a massive heat shield made of many small positionable mirrors in an umbrella shape at the front of the vessel. This shield protects the relatively fragile main hull of the Icarus craft from the intense radiation and superheated particles of the solar wind, which at such close proximity to the Sun can dissolve most materials near-instantaneously. The stellar bomb is located just behind the heat shield, with the remainder of the ship, including the engines, living quarters, oxygen garden, computer core, and other structure behind a second, smaller heat shield. This second shield will be used as both protection and a solar sail during the return trip, after the payload is deployed into the Sun taking the larger shield with it.
As the movie opens, the Icarus II is passing into the "dead zone", beyond which the radio communications of the crew back to Earth are lost in the solar wind. Mission Physicist Capa records a last-minute message to send back to his sister on Earth, while psychiatrist Searle views the Sun's filtered light on the ship's solar observation deck, pushing the limits of the computer's safety protocols to view as much light as is allowed."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_%282007_film%29