Jonathan Payek

"Of course he is guilty of nothing, but it was still somehow difficult to accept that the kind-faced, bespectacled man standing next to me was connected to the war and the chaos is brought."

- Kei Nagase

Professor Jonathan Payek is the astronomer credited for discovering Ulysses 1994XF04 in October 1994. Payek's son followed his father's footsteps and the two continued to work as of 2012 in observing near-Earth asteroids.

Payek's son married an editor who met and worked with Kei Nagase, and Nagase eventually met Payek and his son. She asked them if they "observed anything interesting lately", but they held an empty glare and did not respond, leading Nagase to correctly deduce that the pair discovered another asteroid heading for Earth. She later told this story to Osean President Vincent Harling when accepting a mission to destroy the asteroid, citing her desire to "keep little one-year-old Mia [Payek's son's daughter] and her happy family safe".