The first lunar city, and the site of the preparatory school for Gundam Pilots. The construction of Copernicus began in C.E. 10, in order to provide a source of raw materials for the space colony program, and the city was opened to civilian inhabitants two years later.

At the start of C.E. 70, with war between Earth and the PLANTs seeming all but inevitable, the United Nations chose Copernicus as the site of a final round of peace negotiations. However, on February 5 of that year, the negotiations were disrupted by a terror bombing. The Tragedy of Copernicus claimed the lives of the sponsor nations' representatives and wiped out the senior leadership of the United Nations, and PLANT representative Siegel Clyne escaped only because his arrival had been delayed by a shuttle malfunction. This catastrophe, which the sponsor nations blamed on the PLANTs, was the final trigger that escalated the dispute into all-out war.