It was a mild October day in Hollywood, but a trace of artificial snow remained on the ground as Neil deGrasse Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium, at the American Museum of Natural History, walked around a back lot at Paramount Studios. Late the previous evening, the street corner outside a fake storefront had stood in for the bus depot on a snowy night in Ithaca, New York, and a young actor had portrayed the Tyson of nearly forty years ago: a senior at the Bronx High School of Science who had been summoned to Cornell University by Carl Sagan, at the time the best-known astrophysicist in the world. Tyson had filmed a short introduction to the scene. Toeing snow with the tip of a cowboy boot, he told me, “I faced straight to the camera and said, ‘This is a moment from my past.’ ”

In the flashback scene, Tyson is heading home to New York after a daylong visit. Sagan hands Tyson his home phone number, telling him to call if the bus is delayed by weather. The encounter is being reconstructed for a thirteen-episode series, “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey,” which Fox will begin airing on March 9th. The show is a sequel to “Cosmos: A Personal Voyage,” the celebrated series that was hosted by Sagan and broadcast on PBS, in 1980. Sagan, who died in 1996, was an erudite guide to the universe, conveying the excitement of discoveries within the solar system and beyond.

Tyson is the host of the new “Cosmos,” and he was in Los Angeles for the final days of shooting. After nine months in locations ranging from Iceland to Italy, “Cosmos” had come to the Paramount lot to shoot special effects, including a simulation of how a New York City street would look in zero gravity. A common misconception is to think that, in such conditions, everything floats upward, as in a vision of Rapture. Tyson observed an extra, wearing a hidden harness, walk up a stepladder that had been placed in front of a green screen. At the top, he continued a diagonal trajectory, as if there were invisible steps. “He’s a good zero-g guy,” Tyson said.

Tyson hosted PBS’s “NOVA ScienceNOW” for four seasons, and he is a frequent guest on “CBS This Morning” and “The Colbert Report.” He has flown to and from Los Angeles within hours to appear on Bill Maher’s program. But “Cosmos” is Tyson’s first Hollywood production, and he was interested to discover that a movie set has laws almost as stringent as those of physics. “The crew doesn’t speak to the talent, unless the talent speaks to them,” he said, as he stepped over snaking lighting cables. Tyson spoke to everyone, like a politician working a room. Chatting with an intern, he debated the strengths of Shake Shack versus those of In-N-Out Burger.

He is tall and charismatic, with a deep, commanding voice that can shift register from a honeyed purr to a practiced roar of outrage. His wardrobe invites notice: bright patterned vests, suède shirts, broad-brimmed felt hats in the style of Indiana Jones. (Onscreen for “Cosmos,” he was required to dress down—a blue suit, a safari jacket.) As a makeup artist powdered his hairline, he began talking with her about New Age philosophy. Tyson questioned its vaunting of ancient wisdom. “In practically every idea we have as humans, the older version of it is not better than the newer version,” he said. “With the invested effort of generations, and centuries, and sometimes millennia of smart people who have been born since the idea came out, we have improved ideas.”

The shoot went late into the evening, but Tyson seemed tireless, pacing in front of the camera like a prowling lion. At one point, he read copy that described different kinds of light, visible and invisible. “In microwave light we can see all the way back to the birth of the universe,” he read from a teleprompter. “We have only just opened our eyes.” He repeated the lines a dozen times, to get the proper balance of authority and wonder. For a scene rendering the Big Bang, he posed against a green screen, coolly put on a pair of sunglasses, then flung out his arms in a gesture suggesting a crucifixion, all the while affecting the stony countenance of an action hero.

Sagan, who was born in 1934, was a scientist of the Apollo era, when the year 2001 connoted not terror but Stanley Kubrick’s vision of a lone astronaut journeying deep into space, in pursuit of expansive enlightenment. Sagan was the chairman of a committee that selected the recordings included on gold-plated disks carried into space by the two Voyager interstellar spacecraft, in 1977: Beethoven, Chuck Berry, greetings in fifty-five languages. Sagan was not altogether optimistic about the future of his own species: the threat of nuclear annihilation is a motif of the original “Cosmos.” But he did believe that certain battles against ignorance had been decisively won, and that humankind was oriented firmly toward progress.

The context in which Tyson promotes science suggests otherwise. A few years ago, when the Museum of Natural History mounted an exhibition devoted to Charles Darwin, officials felt it necessary to train docents how to respond to challenges from creationists, who still number nearly half the American public, according to a 2012 Gallup poll. Since the mid-sixties, NASA’s funding has dwindled from four per cent of the federal budget to half of one per cent. Tyson, who is fifty-five, was a child when astronauts first landed on the Moon and barely a teen when the missions ended, in 1972. Recently, he has been obliged to contend with the conspiracy theory that the landings were a government-sponsored hoax—a theory promoted, in part, by a widely seen television special broadcast by Fox. (In a podcast interview, Tyson dismissed the theory with characteristic verve. “If there were ever a state secret that the government wanted to keep, it would be the behavior of President Clinton’s genitals, O.K.? But that got out!” he said. “You’re going to hoax a Moon landing by telling ten thousand scientists and engineers to keep it secret for forty years?”)

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Tyson’s rhetorical style differs dramatically from Sagan’s. Sagan paid deference to high culture: he drew his comparisons from ancient history and his vocabulary from literature. Tyson’s preferred frame of reference is pop culture. This does not mean that he has unsophisticated tastes: his friends still talk about the hundred-year-old wine that he served at a nine-course dinner celebrating the turn of the millennium. And he has a library of rare antiquarian scientific volumes, including a third edition of Sir Isaac Newton’s “Principia,” which he considers the most important book ever written. But when explaining science he is most likely to point to a movie such as “A Bug’s Life.” (An ant constructs a telescope by wrapping a blade of grass around a water droplet, thus illustrating the concept of surface tension.) He is the host of an entertaining radio show, “StarTalk,” whose guests include both professors and comedians. Tyson meets people where they are, rather than seeking to raise them to where he is. Joe Patterson, a professor of astronomy at Columbia University, told me, “Neil is kind of a combination of Carl Sagan and Mister Rogers.”