The first human colony beyond the solar system, cut off from Earth for seventy years after a disaster.
Terra Nova was Earth's first deep-space colony, founded about nine years' travel from Earth at early warp speeds. Contact was lost some seventy years before Enterprise arrives, after a disagreement with Earth over further colony ships. An asteroid strike had thrown radioactive material into the atmosphere, killing the adults and leaving the surviving children to flee underground.
In Terra Nova an away team finds an empty town and fifty-two people living in caves. Archer eventually convinces the survivors, now called Novans, to move away from their contaminated water to a safer region of the planet.