Mission: Dawn

Imagine, if you will, that you are a Starfleet admiral. You oversee the deployments of a large number of ships. You assign their missions. You give orders to their captains.

No matter how many ships in your fleet, no matter how many captains you command, no matter how many lives are affected by the decisions you make, there is one thing that is, and always will be, infinitely larger than the number of ships you have, larger than the number of captains you command, larger than the number of lives you command. What is this thing? Space.

Now imagine how many worlds must exist in all that space. A lot? How many of them are habitable? How many of them are populated by intelligent species?

Imagine that part of your charter is to explore space, to find strange new worlds, to seek out new life forms and new civilizations. Imagine that space is so large that all of the ships in the fleet you command cannot possible visit them all in one lifetime, or in a thousand lifetimes.

Can you imagine all that? Well stop imagining. Because it's all real.

Now think about the logistics here. How do you decide which worlds to explore? How do you decide which ones are worth visiting? If a world was interesting enough, you might send one of your ships to explore it. But what criteria do you use to determine what is "interesting"?

You could send out probes to study various worlds from a distance. Then you would review and analyze the information from the probes. If the information you receive from the probes meets your criteria of "interesting", why then it might be worth sending a ship, and a live crew, to investigate further.

Now you've got a "breadth" versus "depth" situation. You can send a ship out with a mission, to search as many worlds as possible, looking for "interesting ones". That ship won't be able to stay too long to explore any given world, because she's got to look for the next interesting world. That's going for breadth.

Alternatively, you can send out a ship to one of the interesting worlds. That ship would stay there a while and her crew would learn as much as they could about that world. They wouldn't get to visit too many worlds though. That's going for depth.

If you really were a Starfleet admiral, you'd use a combination of the breadth and depth strategies. You'd use automated probes to cast a wide net of exploration, looking for worlds that exhibit signs of interest. You'd have a corp of ships whose mission is to visit a world, stay a while and study it.

If the ship was Dawn, then she would be one of those ships.