“Cosmos,” the 1980 documentary mini-series that encouraged a generation of viewers to contemplate the origins of the universe and their place in it, and made an unlikely television personality out of the astronomer Carl Sagan, is poised to return to terrestrial airwaves. Only this time the starship is being steered by a pilot whose identity you might not surmise even if you had billions and billions of guesses.

On Friday the Fox network is to announce that it has ordered a 13-episode series, “Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey,” expected to be broadcast in 2013. As part of a creative team that includes Ann Druyan, Sagan’s widow and a collaborator on the original “Cosmos,” one of the executive producers is Seth MacFarlane, the creator, producer, co-star and animating spirit of “Family Guy,” the bawdy and irreverent Fox cartoon sitcom.

Yet behind a comic sensibility that is sometimes provocative and sometimes puerile, Mr. MacFarlane is a committed fan of the first “Cosmos” who laments a modern society that he says has lost its fascination with science.

“We’re obsessed with angels and vampires and whatnot,” Mr. MacFarlane, 37, said in a telephone interview, “when there are many more exciting and very real and much more spectacular things to be excited about, that are right in our own planetary backyard.”