The Conestoga carried the first Human extra solar colony effort to Terra Nova, a class M planet twenty light years from Earth. The ship was designed for a one way mission - on arrival the colonists would break it up for raw materials to build the colony with.

At warp 1.3 the trip to Terra Nova took nine years to complete, from 2067 to 2076. The flight was successful, and initially the colony flourished. When Earth decided to send a follow-up colony ship in 2081, the Novans objected. Strained negotiations followed but these were mysteriously terminated, apparently by the Novans, and there was no further contact until the NX-01 Enterprise arrived in 2151.

Enterprise discovered that the planet had been hit by a large asteroid. The surviving Novans assumed that Earth had decided to destroy the original colony to open the way for more development. Radiation forced them to move underground, and by the time Enterprise arrived the colonists were barely recognisable as Human any more. Their language had significantly evolved, and they had acclimated to conditions underground to the point where they barely needed to go above at all.

Although the Novans were highly suspicious of the Enterprise personnel, a degree of peaceful understanding was eventually reached

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