Derrick Pitts

Acting

Derrick Pitts

Born

1955-01-22 (71)

Place of birth

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

Known for

Acting

Credits

6 titles

Derrick Pitts is an American astronomer and science communicator. Pitts studied at St. Lawrence University and has been employed at the Franklin Institute since 1978 where he is chief astronomer and director of the institute's Fels Planetarium.

Known for

UFOs: Investigating the Unknown poster
7.1

The truth behind the U.S. government's secret Pentagon program on UAPs, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, otherwise known as UFOs, is exposed.

UFOs: Investigating the Unknown

2023

Looking for Life on Mars poster
7.5

NASA launches its most ambitious hunt for traces of life on Mars, landing a car-sized rover in a rocky, ancient river delta. The rover will stow samples for possible return to Earth and test technology that may pave the way for human travel to Mars.

Looking for Life on Mars

2021

Touching the Asteroid poster
7.0

Spacecraft OSIRIS-REx attempts to grab a piece of an asteroid to bring back to Earth so scientists can study it to learn about the planet's origins.

Touching the Asteroid

2020

Miniverse poster
5.0

What if you could get behind the wheel and race through space? We scale down the Solar System to the continental United States and place the planets along the way to better appreciate the immense scale of the Universe. See space as never before, with Mars looming over the Freedom Tower and Jupiter towering above the Lincoln Memorial. Join former astronaut Chris Hadfield - a YouTube sensation for his performance of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” aboard the International Space Station - and his interstellar hitchhikers Michio Kaku and astronomers Derrick Pitts and Laura Danly. It’s a joyride from coast to coast - and from the sun to Pluto.

Miniverse

2017

Pluto and Beyond poster
8.2

The New Horizons spacecraft attempts to fly by a mysterious object known as Arrokoth, believed to be a primordial building block of the solar system. Three years after taking the first spectacular photos of Pluto, New Horizons is four billion miles from Earth, trying to achieve the most distant flyby in NASA’s history. If successful, it will shed light on one of the least understood regions of our solar system: the Kuiper Belt.

Pluto and Beyond

2019

To Space & Back poster
NR

To Space & Back takes audiences on an incredible journey from the far reaches of our known universe to our own planet. It is an extraordinary story of human ingenuity and incredible engineering, describing how the technology that transports us through space is paving the way for the devices and apps we use every day. What is happening up there is shaping what we do down here.

To Space & Back

2013

Film credits

2010s · 2 titles

Series credits

Behind the camera