The USM Auriga is a fictional space vessel as a well as a principal location featured in the Aliens film series. It was the main setting used in the 1997 feature film, Alien: Resurrection.
The USM Auriga is a medical research vessel contracted through the United Systems Military. It had a standing crew of forty-two enlisted officers and seven science officers. In the year 2379, the staff of the Auriga conducted a series of experiments in order to develop the ultimate biological weapon - a Human/Xenomorph hybrid. This project was cultivated through the use of DNA acquired from a woman named Ellen Ripley, who died some two-hundred years earlier after playing a host to a Queen alien. The first seven attempts at creating this hybrid form resulted in a string of grotesque failed Ripley clones, but the eighth experiment, classified as Ripley 8, proved successful.