A shuttlecraft of the Enterprise-D in which Doctor Pulaski and Data examined a child from the Darwin station in 2365, exposing Pulaski to a rapid ageing disease.
The Sakharov was a shuttlecraft of the Enterprise-D, named after the physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov.
It is used in Unnatural Selection. The crew of the supply ship Lantree have died of old age within days, and the same illness has reached the genetic research station on Gagarin IV. The scientists insist that their genetically engineered children are healthy and beg for them to be taken off. Picard will not risk his ship, so Katherine Pulaski proposes to examine one boy aboard a shuttle, away from the Enterprise, with Data as pilot.
She begins to age almost at once: the children's aggressive immune systems are the cause. Pulaski takes the Sakharov on to the station and stays there until a transporter cure is found.