Star Trek Voyager actor, Tim Russ, is helping NASA find asteroids for an upcoming mission.
Russ played Lieutenant Commander Tuvok on Star Trek Voyager for over five years and it seems he's charting a course for space once more (kind of).
He's not exploring new planets aboard the USS Voyager this time, though, as he's helping locate asteroids in space from Earth using a special telescope, as reported by USA Today.
Russ is a citizen astronomer and he's been a part of the Los Angeles Astronomical Society for 29 years. He told USA Today that he's been a hobby astronomer for 35 years, so his history in Star Trek and what he's doing with NASA now is simply a coincidence (although it's quite a fun one).
As for why NASA needs the help of Russ and five other citizen astronomers, the answer is simple: their telescopes can find Patroclus. He received an email from Unistellar, the maker of his Unistellar eVscope and eQuinox telescope, asking if he was willing to volunteer his time and efforts to help NASA locate Patroclus, an asteroid orbiting Jupiter.
"[The Unistellar eVscope and eQuinox telescope] will simply find a starfield on its own and it will figure out where it is," Russ told USA Today. "You just punch in the object you want to go see. After you punch that in, it will move to that object on its own and it'll hold it and track it. Then, it'll layer the images for that object so the object becomes much bigger in size."
Finding Patroclus will aid NASA's upcoming October mission that will see the organization launch a probe named Lucy into space to study the Trojan Asteroids, which includes Patroclus.
"Lucy will launch in October 2021 and, with boosts from Earth's gravity, will complete a 12-year journey to eight different asteroids — a Main Belt asteroid and seven Trojans, four of which are members of 'two-for-the-price-of-one binary systems," NASA's Lucy mission overview reads. "Lucy's complex path will take it to both clusters of Trojans and give us our first close-up view of all three major types of bodies in the swarms."
"[The] Lucy mission will revolutionize our knowledge of planetary origins and the formation of the solar system," NASA's overview reads. "Lucy's discoveries will open new insights into the origins of our Earth and ourselves."
For more about asteroids, check out this story about how NASA can predict the probability of hazardous asteroid paths up to nearly 300 years from now, and then read this story about a metallic asteroid between Mars and Jupiter that has an estimated worth of $10,000 quadrillion. Check out this first look at an asteroid sample from space after that.
Wesley LeBlanc is a freelance news writer and guide maker for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @LeBlancWes.
(Photo by Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images)