Zenith Lore (part 5)

ATTENTION! All material described here is fictional. Any resemblence to real life events is coincidental and is not intended to be offensive.

PREV: PART 4

NEXT: PART 6 (unrelated site only, link is in the site transfer post)

SITE TRANSFER AND NEWS

FIRST: PART 1

SECTION FIVE-ONE: Waiting for the visit

After Zenith was done with setting his place up, he decided to find a way to kill some time. And he did; he decided to the test the driving dynamics of his cars on the surface of Titan, which has far lower gravity but a much denser atmosphere than Earth. Due to this, top speeds were slower, and he flipped many of them several times, though this wasn't a problem due to the added nihilium reinforcements. He could simply grab the vehicles, flip them back over, and continue driving. Finally, a message came that the human-made craft had arrived in Titan's primary sphere of influence. Zenith went back and started turning lights on to mark a landing spot.

SECTION FIVE-TWO: The Visit

He knew the craft would be big, but what he didn't know was the configuration of the craft. The humans came with a large space station-like craft that sent out an aircraft-like vehicle into the atmosphere and onto the surface. With that, they instead found a long and flat area that would be used as an improvised runway; the landing gear was thoroughly tested and could easily survive landing even with the pebble-filled terrain. They had no ground vehicles to speak of, so Zenith instead drove his cars there and picked the guests up. Afterwards, they arrived at the initial landing area, and Zenith guided them to his base, as the humans could barely walk with the heavy space suits. Those were later taken off, with a fresh breath of Earth-like air inside. Zenith made each of the visitors what they wanted, mostly water, wine, and coffee, while he himself drank some liquid methane that was stored in semi-transparent jugs that resembled the same ones that are used to carry around automotive fuel. Due to the visitors primarily being high-rank government officials, they said to keep the conversation very secretive: all that's been declassified is the allowance for humans to learn and use of Zenith's advanced propulsion engines, and the intersystematic ban of embedding or mixing of nihilium with human skin tissue and other biological materials.

SECTION FIVE-THREE: The Planet Hunts

This conversation would result in nihilium-based technology being far more accessible, with several spacecraft being equipped with Logic Breakers, and even simplified versions of the Hyperspeed booster on the highest-performing ones; simply put, spaceflight technology has greatly leaped forwards. This allowed for the human exploration of exoplanets, that could previously only be observed from far away means, such as the James Webb Space Telescope. Thus, a new type of event, the Planet Hunt was created. On the very first one, the event was mainly centered around the exploration of nearby celestial bodies. As such, the entire Alpha Centauri system, the closest one to the Solar System, was eventually flocking with spacecraft, which began with the famous case of the SOL-003: the very first human-made spacecraft that was equipped with original Zenith components rather than with simplified replicas produced under license. TRAPPIST-1 was another hotspot. Zenith went ahead and visited the system as his first contribution. While planet hopping from inward to outward, he realized just how glorious this system was, and set up his second main base on the famous 4th planet (TRAPPIST-1e). For a system or planet to impress Zenith is one thing, but having him set up a base there like a gift from the heavens. The views of the other planets were a spectacular sight, and a nice change from seeing Saturn and the occasional moon or two passing by.

SECTION FIVE-FOUR+FIVE-FIVE (EXTRA LONG): Telescopes Galore

(there's a heck ton of technobabble here, i tried to keep it as low as possible but it's still a lot)
To aid in the Planet Hunts, several new telescopes were made using nihilium technology, they were remarkably expensive but their success far outweighed any other one, rivaling or even surpassing the likes of legends such as Hubble or Kepler. The first of these was the URADS (Uranus Radial Atmosphere Detector Scope, sometimes Uranus Detector Scope), which, as the name suggests, was put into orbit around Uranus, and utilized licensed nihilium device replicas, with estimates saying it could detect a single strand of a carbon fiber on the surface of the Mars if it were in low earth orbit. It was extremely potent at detecting liquid water, which quickly lead to the discovery of many potentially habitable worlds. Its most notable discovery was URADS-42 in the SDG-1 galaxy. URADS-42 is a single G-class star with three planets. The inner two were hellish lava worlds, while the outermost planet, URADS-42D, was an ocean world with a water vapour dominated atmosphere, somewhat comparable to Gliese 1214 b.
Next was REAS, or Realtime Exoplanet Atmosphere Surveyor. It was initially put into LEO before being moved to Lagrange 2 and conjoined with another telescope, which we will talk about later. REAS could detect clouds, water, and sometimes even vegetation on several celestial bodies in the Milky Way, although this was before the conjoining. Its most notable discovery is REAS-21S, an F-type main sequence star, with the "S" suffix meaning that it was done with the joined power of the two telescopes. The star has one planet, named REAS-21S1, and was regarded as "Kepler-22b's faraway cousin" due to its striking resemblance to the watery world.
And finally, the absolute top dog. SpectralDetector, or SD abbreviated. Its name may seem primitive at first, but a hidden component installed by Zenith himself is what gave the magic. Using a level 4 Logic Breaker and several other things, this secret piece let SD exceed the range of even JWST, and even the most pessimistic of astronomy magazines said that it was likely it could detect a proton on the surface of Proxima Centauri b. Located at Lagrange 2, this was used to uncover what is today known as "Zenith's Galaxy", or codenamed SDG-1 and COSMO-1Z, a galaxy about half the size of the Milky Way heading rapidly towards the Milky Way, far faster than any other one seen yet. At the time of discovery, it was around 2.8 million light years away. The galaxy had extraordinary properties, and so far SD has discovered hundreds of thousands of stars with exoplanets within it. The most notable is SD 1592, or commonly known as "Sirodis". It has two major planets, the first being "Utopia", a strangely orange world which is now known as one of the first potentially confirmed, and the first truly confirmed superhabitable planet. Zenith later personally fully confirmed its status and offered to transport over 3 billion humans to help the issue of overpopulation. The second planet is a gas giant located in the habitable zone, although its nickname "Osiris" is less known than its codename SD 1592 c. It has several moons, including the somewhat habitable "Codrisa", or the heavily cracked Sparia and Viratis. SD later conjoined with the REAS telescope to form SD-REAS, sometimes humourously nicknamed the "San Andreas Telescope", all discoveries from this were marked with either as the usual SD markings, or REAS markings with an S suffix after the number as seen with the previous entry.