the captain decided that the Terra Nova would not return to Earth, instead waiting a safe distance from the attack range of the COREs for the time that it would be of use to Earth. The Solar System The Belt Community: Being as the asteroid belt is ungovernably large, the Belt community consists of widely spread independent and corporate mining operations, with Ceres at its core as the primary trading post. Although conventional law enforcement throughout the belt is impossible, Ceres itself is governed under the just (if not heavy-handed) watch of the Autocrat. Once plagued by rock wars (vicious skirmishes which typically arose due to disputes over mining rights), the death penalty has been frequently employed to keep the population in check. Although the secrets of the Autocrat are closely guarded, the Belt Community has developed a device called the Core cracker, and quite seriously offered to blow up the planet Mercury both to create a second asteroid belt and assist VISOR in the terraforming of Venus. Gravitics Research Station: Control center for the Ring of Charon, the largest particle accelerator ever built. Slated to be mothballed by the UN following the K-crash after years of unsuccessful experimentation, a perfectly timed breakthrough by Larry Chao held off the shutdown of the facility. Located on Pluto, this was where human experiments in gravity control resulted in the accidental awakening of the Lunar Ring and the theft of Earth. The Ring was a crucial tool in the later study of Charonians and eventually to fight against them. Tycho Purple Penal: Once a UN-sanctioned prison colony buried under Tycho Crater on the moon, this converted penitentiary was declared a sovereign republic in order to release the UN of its responsibility to maintain it. Controlled by former inmates, the colony was taken under the influence of the radical Naked Purple social movement, and subsequently renamed Tycho Purple Penal. Standing restrictions on immigration forbade any resident from leaving the colony, but Marcia MacDougal was able to overcome this obstacle when she was declared a refugee following the burning of her parents' house. VISOR: Venus Initial Station for Operational Research, the human research facility built to study possible methods of terraforming the world. Following notification of Larry Chao's gravity experiment, all of the facility's instruments were focused on Earth at the time of the Big Jump. Observations made by several scientists on VISOR were later