Planet

Moon
Edalyth has two natural satellites, Sabbina and Crez. Their tidal forces exerted on Edalyth is a major factor of Edalyth's liquid ocean.

Sabbina is the closest natural satellite of Edalyth. It is a massive moon tidally locked to Edalyth in a synchronous orbit, meaning Sabbina will always face Edalyth on the same side. Sabbina's surface is enriched with iron and rare minerals, possibly gathered from centuries of bombardment from interstellar objects, giving it a red and white tint. Water ice exist on Sabbina's surface. A separate colony ship will arrive after Starlight_03 which will have its occupation on Sabbina's surface and in orbit. There will be mining outposts and refueling stations to supply the facilities on Edalyth.

Crez is a far smaller natural satellite that exist in high Edalyth orbit. It was believed that Crez was formed when Edalyth passes through an asteroid belt in it's home system during it's escape trajectory and those asteroids that didn't fell to Edalyth slowly gathered and formed Crez today. Crez is in an elliptical inclined orbit, with a fairly uneven distance to Edalyth. This unevenness causes higher tides and stronger waves at times. Crez surface is very bumpy and rugged, with mountain ranges across its surface. Its surface appears yellow and blue, possibly from sulfur deposits and copper deposits. Crez will not get an established outpost in the foreseeable future, except maybe mining expeditions for rarer minerals and study on its composition for research use, but the operation cost is quite above what the funding allows. What will happen though, is that there will be an orbital gateway in Crez orbit where is will help transferring ships back to the solar system.

The two natural satellites of Edalyth will be an important step to Edalyth's research. The intertwined relationship between the life form on Edalyth as well as its special conditions poses interest to discovering the past history of this mysterious and wonderful world awaiting to be explored.

Atmosphere
Edalyth is a hostile place, and one of its most significant feature known for it's hostility is the atmosphere itself. The atmosphere on Edalyth is dense, toxic and have extreme weathers. Its certainly not a sign of welcome.

Since Edalyth is a rogue planet, it have had probably travelled billions of years alone in the vast galaxy, sucking up all there is in the vast expanse. It might have passed through gas clouds or nearby galaxies and in the meantime sucked up all kinds of materials. Most of it are dense gases and hydrogen that got attracted to Edalyth's sphere of influence. Overtime this made up a large proportion of Edalyth's fading atmosphere and eventually became this dense pile of gases and water. This dense atmosphere also caused a higher air pressure and made it ore difficult for grounding crew to adapt. The atmosphere of Edalyth extends up to 90 km from Edalyth.

The atmosphere on Edalyth is none breathable by humans, at least not directly. While there is about 24% oxygen in it's atmosphere, there is also a large percentage of chlorine, a bit over 4%. This made the air intoxicating and also created a lot of dangerous compounds in the air. There are also plenty of hazardous particulates that hang in the air that is fine enough to damage our lungs and get into electronics and deal damage. All grounding personnel are require to equip a base of level 1 respiratory protection gear when exiting clear contamination zone under direct command from command center. Personnel who are in EVA are recommended to use closed system gas tanks for EVA operations, and use high grade filters only in decontamination rooms or during transit in order to preserve the limited amount of heavy filters available to the crew.

Weather on Edalyth is far from normal when compare d to what we are used to on Earth. the dense atmosphere allow sound to travel further, causing louder and more far reaching thunder cracks. The turbulence in the atmosphere are rather violent, causing more storms than usual. One of the most significant feature of Edalyth's weather is of course, the dust blizzards. The extreme tidal forces created from it's moons dragged up an atmospheric tide where air cluster up like waves. This causes extra turbulence in the air and dragged up fine ice particulates. Since a lot of Edalyth's surface is ice and ocean, there isn't much to dampen the wind. Since the large storms have been stirred up at some breakneck wind speed, most of the time created during high tides. The dust particulates travel in the air very fast and can sometimes fly faster than bullets and can shatter or punch holes in spacecraft hulls if large enough. This is why landing on Edalyth and EVA activities are so dangerous. Fine dust particles can get into seams of docking ports, or fine electronic apparatus, clogging up filtering systems and perhaps even smashing entire bases open. There were already 26 probe lost due to dust blizzards. This strange weather phenomenon also created something very interesting. By brushing through the 7% of landmass above water, there are plenty of minerals and soil that got grinned up into fine powder that when clustered to the snow particles form some sort of mineral snow. This grayish black mineral snow includes a lot of inorganic compound. When they fall into the ocean marine creature would feed on it and there is a general trend of autotropic creatures that roots itself under the ice sheets and absorb the mineral snow from below.

Edalyth's atmosphere plays an important role to human expedition as well as the life form present there. It is a huge factor in tackling the history of life on Edalyth and a huge step towards understanding how life came to be on this wondrous world.

Ocean
Edalyth possess massive oceans covering over 93% of its surface, consisting of open waters and sub-glacial oceans. There are two major natural factors that kept Edalyth's oceans warm in the first place. Tidal forces and a very dense atmosphere. The two moons Edalyth carries provide tidal forces that squeezes the planet and keeping it warm, while stirring up the ocean and maintaining a convection of heat. The super dense atmosphere also traps heat in the surface layers. Down in the ocean there are geothermal vents that spew out minerals and exhaust a lot of heat into arts of the ocean. The heat from the surface and the bottom maintained a convection of water flow where the temperature evens out. There are data that also points out that Edalyth may have been a newly formed planet not long ago, hence all the turbulence in its mantle.

However, this should still not be enough to keep this large amount of the ocean to become liquid ocean. This is where the life forms come into place. When life started popping up in the bottom of the ocean, they can only rely on the heat provided from the vents. But later on when life on Edalyth started evolving predation they have to expand into upper waters in order to be able to thrive. So some creatures start going up above to rest and escape from dangers and dive back down to obtain food. Around that time Edalyth is already too far away from its home star to maintain sufficient heat. To avoid death by freezing, some of these creatures started adopting enzymes and anti freeze protein to generate enough heat to maintain a living status. More life start poping up and competition becomes more and more fierce, more creatures start moving up and above and they eventually warmed up the entire ocean. Some microbes synthesizes mineral snow from snow storms to generate heat. The immensely crowded ecosystem allowed the ocean to be warm enough to be liquid. It was suggested that the shallow ice covered seas and sub-glacial oceans that now are only meters of ice in thickness may have once extended to far reaches below the ocean, and have only melted after the life forms start a global warming effect.

Composition analysis from probes shows that the oceans mainly consist of water, with high contents of heavy metals and salt compounds. Samples collected from the surface shows high content of organic compounds and chlorides including dissolved hydrogen chloride in the water. It is also full of microbial life form and tiny debris, yet scanners at that time are incapable of sample studies at that level. The average water temperature in the upper zones is around 4 degrees Celsius, occasionally dropping below zero degrees. The lower parts of the oceans are usually warmer, sometimes even reaching 20 degrees Celsius. Life is most fertile in these parts of warm areas where species variations are far more common and population is quite dense in these regions.

The ocean on Edalyth can be quite deep, with a maximum depth of 17,360 meters, located at the Cerentalia Trench, the deepest point on Edalyth discovered yet. There are however, biomes on Edalyth that extent to kilometres wide that has liquid water covering land only at most 2 meters deep. One of these example is the Welenquin Plains, spanning across over 12 sq km with maximum depth of 3.6 meters during tides. It exist entirely underwater, but you can traverse it entirely on foot.

Edalyth's ocean is clearly the keen interest of the expedition mission, where most EVA activities will be conducted at. There is plenty to uncover in these foreign waters, and it will be an important clue as to the history of Edalyth.

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