Aratoht

Description
"Like Mount Everest inside an oven," was how Jon Grissom characterized Aratoht while on an Alliance fact-finding mission to see if the garden world was worth contestation with the batarians. His team ultimately decided that the planet's air pressure and oxygen content were too low for large-scale human habitation, ending a year-long political battle with the batarians and the Citadel Council's Committee on Habitable Worlds. Since then, the Batarian Hegemony has quietly colonized the planet's polar regions, where the heat is manageable due to heavy rainfall.

Information on the colony itself is restricted by the Hegemony's Department of Information Control, but a few facts are known. A large-scale operation to increase the oxygen content of the planet is under way: skilled workers constantly dump cyanobacteria into the oceans and seed the habitable zone with invasive plant species. Slave labor is largely reserved for the planet's extensive mining industry, which takes advantage of the high-density planet's rich lodes of ferrous and heavy metals. Alliance intelligence has also confirmed that the colony is home to several batarian military installations, a threatening sign for a planet this close to Earth's local cluster and the Exodus Relay. Its infrastructure includes many satellites and several space stations.

EDI'S TRAVEL ADVISORY: The Batarian Hegemony considers any presence of Alliance military vessels in batarian space as hostile. The Normandy SR2, while an independent vessel, strongly resembles the Normandy SR1, an Alliance ship. Use of stealth systems is highly recommended.

Mineral Deposits
Aratoht is an assignment world and cannot be mined.