Eat. Breathe. Do Science. Sleep later. That’s the motto of Derrick Pitts, NASA Solar System Ambassador.
When asked about the first time he made a personal connection with space, Pitts answered:
“There are three instances (all realizations about the sky before I was 12): First was when as a child, enthralled with the rockets of the space program, I realized that Mercury astronauts Shepard, Grissom and Glenn were going to fly in space. Second was when I realized that my street ran east-west and the adjacent street running north-south T’d into mine and I could use the street set-up as a solar clock, reading the motion of Earth in the solar system. Third was when I went out onto my street to look up at the sky after reading a “Scientific American” article about how spectra of the most distant galaxies told the story of the expansion of the universe. I looked into the sky with a totally different understanding of it than I had just a few hours before.”
Since 1990 he has been the Chief Astronomer and Director of the Fels Planetarium at The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. He has been a NASA Solar System Ambassador since 2009, and previously served as the “Astrobiology Ambassador” for the NASA/MIRS/UNCF Special Program Corporation’s Astrobiology Partnership Program. He also served as a science museum/planetarium/community outreach advisory board member for the next generation Thirty Meter Telescope, currently under construction at Mauna Kea Observatory, Hawaii.
In this image, Pitts examines a telescope owned by Galileo Galilei that was on display at his museum.
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Image Credit: Stuart Watson/The Franklin Institute