Frank Drake

Dr. Frank Donald Drake (born May 28 1930, Chicago) is an American astronomer and astrophysicist. He is most famous for founding SETI and creating the Drake equation.

Early life and education

As a youth in Chicago, Drake loved electronics and chemistry. He reports that he considered the possibility of life existing on other planets as an 8-year-old, but never discussed the idea with his family or teachers due to the prevalent religious ideology.

He enrolled at Cornell University on an ROTC electronics scholarship. Once there he began studying astronomy. His ideas about the possibility of extraterrestrial life were reinforced by a lecture from astrophysist Otto Struve in 1951. After college, he served briefly as an electronics officer on the USS Albany. He then went on to graduate school at Harvard in radio astronomy.

Accomplishments

Although explicitly linked with modern views on the likelihood and detectability of extraterrestrial civilizations, Drake started his career undertaking radio astronomical research at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Green Bank, West Virginia, and later the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He conducted key measurements which revealed the presence of a Jovian ionosphere and magnetosphere.

In 1960 Drake conducted the first radio search for extraterrestrial intelligence, known as Project Ozma. Sifting through the noise while looking at a handful of stars, no evidence for ET signals emerged. Drake commonly regards "contact" as inevitable in the coming years, in the form of a radio or light signal.

In 1961, along with J. Peter Pearman, an officer on the Space Science Board of the National Academy of Sciences, he organized the first SETI conference held at the (NRAO) in Green Bank, West Virginia. At this small gathering of a dozen scientists he proposed his famous Drake equation. The Drake equation defines a set of concatenated probabilities to help set constraints on the number of intelligent civilizations ('N'), and to illustrate our true lack of information (based upon insuffient data) in the pursuit of this exploration. The outcome of such a "sensitivity" analysis reveals that 'N' lies between 1 and 1,000,000.

In the 1960s, Drake spearheaded the conversion of the Arecibo Observatory to a radio astronomical facility, later updated in 1974 and 1996. As a researcher, Drake was involved in the early work on pulsars. In this period, Drake was a professor at Cornell University and Director of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center (NAIC) – the formal name for the Arecibo facility. In 1974 he wrote the Arecibo message.

Drake designed the Pioneer plaque with Carl Sagan in 1972, the first physical message sent into space. The plaque was designed to be understandable by an extraterrestrial should they encounter it. He later supervised the creation of the Voyager Golden Record. He was elected to the AAAS in 1974.

Drake is a member of the National Academy of Sciences where he chaired the Board of Physics and Astronomy of the National Research Council (1989-92). He also served as President of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. He was a Professor of Astronomy at Cornell University (1964-84) and served as the Director of the Arecibo Observatory. He is currently involved in Project Phoenix (SETI)

He is Emeritus Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz where he also served as Dean of Natural Sciences (1984-88).

Honors

Drake Planetarium at Norwood High School in Norwood, Ohio is named for Dr. Drake and linked to NASA.

References

• "Estimating the Chances of Life Out There"—brief biography for astrobiology workshop at the NASA Ames Research Center.

External links

• "The Drake Equation"—Astronomy Cast transcript (html), Fraser Cain and Southern Illinois University Edwardsville professor, Dr. Pamela Gay, Monday 12 February 2007. ( Full pdf transcript.)