Huygens-class survey ship

The Huygens-class survey ship is a survey ship in civilian service throughout human space.

Design details
The Huygens is a human starship in the lower end of the mass range of interstellar spacecraft, measuring just 278.9 ft in length. It maintains a crew of ten, alongside a complement of thirty passangers.

Operational history
The Huygens-class entered service in 2499, and became the premier survey ship of the Unified Earth Government - presumably used by the UEG Cartographic Corps for mapping the expansion of the human colonial sphere.

In the wake of the Human-Covenant War, ships of the class were used to survey glassed worlds and to chart slipspace routes to the known Halo rings. Some of these vessels were pressed into military service within the United Nations Space Command following the The Reclamation to hunt for raiding targets while evading Guardian Custodes.

Production notes
The Huygens-class fulfills a broadly similar role to one of the non-canon ideas suggested by Isaac Hannaford for the during the production of Halo: Warfleet – An Illustrated Guide to the Spacecraft of Halo. When designing the Gladius for the book, Hannaford envisioned the corvette as a highly versatile platform that could be used in scientific and exploration efforts. Appropriately, many of Hannaford's concept illustrations focused on a non-combat exploration ship, UNSC Carl Sagan. Notably, like the Huygens, the Gladius is also manufactured in-universe by Aerofabrique SA—possibly a callback to this origin story.

Trivia
The Huygens-class survey ship is either named in reference to Christiaan Huygens, a Dutch astronomer who notably discovered Saturn's largest moon of Titan, or the Huygens spacecraft, a space probe named after Christiaan Huygens and was the first spacecraft to land on Titan.