Ceti Alpha V
From Memory Alpha, the free Star Trek reference
| Ceti Alpha V | |
|---|---|
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| Class: | M (2156) / H (2285) |
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Ceti Alpha V was the fifth of at least six planets in the Ceti Alpha system, and was "barely Class M" prior to 2268. It was located a considerable distance from the Delphic Expanse and the planet Denobula. (ENT: "Twilight")
In 2267, Khan Noonien Singh and his Augment followers were resettled on this planet by the USS Enterprise. At the time it was a habitable, but untamed, world. (TOS: "Space Seed")
Only six months later, Ceti Alpha VI exploded, shifting Ceti Alpha V's orbit and turning it into a desert-like world, dominated by craylon gas and high-velocity winds. The planet became incapable of supporting life, with the only remaining known indigenous lifeform being the Ceti eel.
In 2285, the USS Reliant visited the planet as part of Project Genesis. Mistaking it for Ceti Alpha VI, Captain Clark Terrell and XO Commander Pavel Chekov beamed down to the surface, only to be taken prisoner by Khan and his surviving followers. Khan then hijacked the Reliant, and stranded its crew on the planet's surface. The crew were later recovered by the USS Enterprise, following Khan's death at the Battle of the Mutara Nebula. (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan)
In an alternate timeline, this planet was the refuge for the last 6,000 members of the Human race in the 2150s and 2160s, survivors of the devastating Xindi attacks on Earth and its colonies, as it was far from the Delphic Expanse. The colony's location was kept secret for a great deal of time, but a Yridian discovered it by tailing Doctor Phlox, thus allowing the Xindi to attack. (ENT: "Twilight")
 Ceti Alpha V in 2285 |
 Commander Pavel Chekov and Captain Clark Terrell on Ceti Alpha V in 2285 |
[edit] Background
There was no explanation given as to how the loss of one planet in a star system could affect others to the degree shown.
The spin-off novel To Reign in Hell: The Exile of Khan Noonien Singh explicitly addressed the above issues. Spock postulated that Ceti Alpha VI's destruction and the environmental impacts on Ceti Alpha V had another, shared cause (possibly a small black hole passing through the system), while apparently the miscounting resulted from the Reliant's crew counting inward, finding the outermost planet (and mistaking the remains of Ceti Alpha VI for part of an outer asteroid belt).
In Vonda N. McIntyre's novelization of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, there was some dialogue between the Reliant's bridge crew speculating about the cause of the discrepancy between the planet count of the system reported by an old interstellar probe (20) and the current count (19) - one possible conclusion they drew was that the limitations of the probe's imaging systems had led to inaccurate data being reported. This dialogue occurred shortly before Terrell and Chekov decide to beam down to the planet.
