Exploring Sirius

Starfarers, 3.

From Sol to Sirius and back is a seventeen year round trip, a relativistic month on the zero-zero drive, plus a year to explore the Sirian System where Sirius B, a white dwarf, orbits A, a blue giant, at thirty kilometers per hour. A has red prominences and an opal corona. B, rotating rapidly, has storms in an atmosphere only a few kilometers high. 

The exploratory team places a station in orbit around B. The station launches a heavily shielded probe that laser-beams data. The probe approaches B until its defenses are overwhelmed, thus gaining otherwise unobtainable information about mass distributions, vectors, fields, fluxes etc.

Sirius features prominently in literature and fiction. See here.