Meanwhile the last of the probes of the explorer program arrived at its destination. The system booted up after 5 years and 179 days, flawlessly. It calculated a capture burn and went into orbit.
The booster stage was easily spent, there was enough fuel in the probe stage to circularise and tweak the orbit for optimized sensor distance. The first round would be radar and biome scans. The dish pinpointed Kerbin and started relaying the data.
Power was weak, but the nuclear generator recharged the batteries which allowed the probe to send out the data, bit by bit. It would take some time to map everything and there was only power for a couple of instruments, so they would need to be rotated.
Two weeks after arrival the biome and radar were switched off and the deep scanning radar was activated.
The science mission starts, and it looked promising. The Kerbals had reached all of the planets….in this solar system.