Professor Frank Drake

Frank Drake (born May 28, 1930, Chicago, Illinois) is an American astronomer and astrophysicist. He is most famous for founding SETI and creating the Drake equation. Image File history File links Frankdrake. ... May 28 is the 148th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (149th in leap years). ... 1930 (MCMXXX) is a common year starting on Wednesday. ... Nickname: The Windy City Motto: Urbs In Horto (Latin: City in a Garden), I Will Official website: http://egov. ... An astronomer or astrophysicist is a scientist whose area of research is astronomy or astrophysics. ... An astrophysicist is a person whose profession is astrophysics. ... SETI (pronounced , to rhyme with Betty) stands for Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. ... The Drake equation (also known as the Green Bank equation or the Sagan equation) is a famous result in the speculative fields of xenobiology, astrosociobiology and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. ...

Early life and education

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

He enrolled at Cornell on an ROTC electronics scholarship. Once there he began studying astronomy. His ideas about the possilbity of extra terrestrial 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. Cornell is the name of some places in the United States of America. ... The Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) is a training program of the United States armed forces present on college campuses to recruit and educate commissioned officers. ... Otto Struve (August 12, 1897 - April 6, 1963) was a Russian-American astronomer. ... The fourth USS Albany (CA-123) was a United States Navy Oregon City-class heavy cruiser, later converted to the guided missile cruiser CG-10. ... Harvard University is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, and a member of the Ivy League. ... Microwave image of 3C353 galaxy at 8. ...

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. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) is an institution set up by the United States government for the purpose of radio astronomy. ... Green Bank is located within Pocahontas County, West Virginia (Eastern Region), inside the Allegheny Mountain Range, and can be reached via Hwy 28. ... The Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in La Cañada Flintridge, near Pasadena, California, USA, builds and operates unmanned spacecraft for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). ...

In 1960 Drake conducted the first radio search for extra terrestrial intelligence, known as Project Ozma. Sifting through the noise while looking at a handful of stars, no evidence for ET signals emerged--but the idea took root. It is important to note that there is no convincing evidence of ET's, a view that Drake espouses--although he commonly regards 'contact' as inevitable in the coming years, in the form of a radio or light signal. Project Ozma was a pioneering SETI experiment started in 1960 by Cornell University astronomer Frank Drake, at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Green Bank, West Virginia. ...

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, briefly, 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. The philosophical implication of this range is profound: are we, as an intelligent species, a cosmic anecdote, or does the universe teem with intelligent life? It is the salience of these extremes that drives the quest to search for extraterrestrial intelligence SETI. The Drake equation (also known as the Green Bank equation or the Sagan equation) is a famous result in the speculative fields of xenobiology, astrosociobiology and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. ...

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. The Arecibo Observatory is located in Arecibo, Puerto Rico on the north coast of the island. ...

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. On board the unmanned spacecraft Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 is a plaque with a pictorial message from mankind. ... Carl Edward Sagan (November 9, 1934 – December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer, astrobiologist and highly successful science popularizer. ... The Voyager Golden Record. ...

Recent activities and academics

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) President Harding and the National Academy of Sciences at the White House, Washington, DC, April 1921 The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a corporation in the United States whose members serve pro bono as advisers to the nation on science, engineering, and medicine. ... This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ...

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). The University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC or UC Santa Cruz) is a coeducational public university located in Santa Cruz, California, USA. It is one of the ten campuses of the University of California, and ranked by US News as the twenty-eighth best public university in the nation. ...