Mavronaut

A mavronaut was a spacer who specialized in venturing close to black holes for scientific or exploratory research. Traveling near black holes often meant that the spacer had to stray off from established hyperlanes, which, coupled with their frequent encounters with small black holes, made the profession one of the deadliest in the history of space travel. Mavronauts often used small ships with extensively modified hulls and particle shield systems to minimize the chances of being effected by a black hole's gravitational pull, and many were accompanied by a fleet of automated probes that assisted them in tracking, cataloguing, and photographing black holes.

History
Black holes were known to the galactic community since its conception, however very little information on the physics of black holes was known as - to no surprise - little to no spacers ever returned from an accidental encounter with one. Eventually, many spacers began making headlines in the media over the millennia during their purported encounters with black holes, inspiring newer generations of space travelers to visit these anomalies frequently, leading to the development of the mavronaut profession. Astronomers who focused on black holes relied on mavronauts for their studies ever since the profession became well known.

In 191 BBY, a fleet of scientific research ships contracted several mavronauts to embark on a large voyage towards what would become known as the "Maw", an area of deep space that contained an abnormally large quantity of small black holes. Not surprisingly, none of the researchers or mavronauts returned from the voyage, prompting the Galactic Senate to outlaw the mavronaut profession and strongly discouraged spacers from intentionally visiting black hole sites at the risk of legal punishment. Despite this, many spacers continued in the footsteps of history's mavronauts and intentionally visited black holes on a yearly basis; those whose exploits were discovered quickly had their licenses stripped in Republic space and, on occasion, faced anywhere from large fines to even prison time. During the reign of the Galactic Empire, ironically, Imperial researchers turned to mavronauts to navigate the Maw, where they began constructing the Maw Installation as a weapons-of-mass-destruction research facility and, according to rumors, as a prison for some of the Empire's greatest enemies. Although mavronauts played a large role in the facility's establishment, the profession remained illegal and laws banning black hole exploration remained heavily enforced.