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Table of Contents
Frank Drake is an American astronomer and astrophysicist involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He is the founder of SETI, developer of the Drake Equation, and the Arecibo Message creator. He also coined the word “pulsar” to describe rapidly rotating neutron stars.
See the fact file below for more information on the Frank Drake or alternatively, you can download our 25-page Frank Drake worksheet pack to utilise within the classroom or home environment.
Key Facts & Information
DRAKE’S EARLY LIFE
- Frank Donald Drake was born on May 28, 1930, in Chicago, Illinois. His parents were Richard Drake, a chemical engineer, and Winifred Thompson.
- He was the eldest sibling of three. His sister Alma became a biochemist, while his brother became an economist. He grew up in a religious family. His parents raised them strictly so their home lacked laughter and joy.
- This led him to have negative views of religion and wonder about the other civilizations in the universe when he was eight. He did not discuss it with his parents and teachers because of their prevalent religious ideology.
- He was also fascinated with simple chemistry and building small motors and engines.
EDUCATION BACKGROUND
- He enrolled at Cornell University, where he had a scholarship in the Navy Reserve Officer Training Corps. He initially intended to become an airplane designer but later majored in engineering physics. He also took this chance to study astronomy.
- When he was 21 years old, he attended a lecture from astrophysicist Otto Struve, which further reinforced his belief in the possibility of extraterrestrial life.
- He graduated with honors and briefly served as an electronics officer on the USS Albany to pay his debt to the US Navy who funded his education. He took to the high seas and became responsible for the electronics onboard the Albay, the Sixth Fleet Ship.
- In 1955, he became a graduate school student and studied radio astronomy at Harvard.
LIFE IN SCIENCE
- Harvard Astronomy department enthusiastically welcomed Drake when he pursued graduate studies in Astronomy at the university. His expertise in electronics benefited the department as they need it to work on radio astronomy. He was also tapped to improve the department’s equipment, which was driven by unreliable vacuum tubes and amplifiers, and constantly breaking down.
- After graduating from Harvard in 1958, his alma mater took him to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Green Bank, West Virginia. The observatory housed an 85-foot radio telescope sensitive enough to detect radio transmissions from extraterrestrials which impressed Drake right away. A year later, Drake began a project called “Project Ozma” to hunt for alien transmissions. It was a secret project at first, as the workers of the project feared ridicule.
- When a paper was published in Nature that suggested astronomers start a project like Drake’s in 1959, they were forced to go public with his planned work.
- Project Ozma began on April 8, 1960, but it detected no aliens.
- However, they once thought they picked up an extraterrestrial transmission, a radio signal beating at a perfectly regular eight times a second.
- The team got excited about the discovery. A local newspaper picked up the news, and a reporter tried to confirm it with Drake. The astronomer neither denied nor confirmed the information.
- When the team concluded that the signal was just an airborne jamming system being tested by a nearby military airbase, conspiracy theories developed around the incident. The extraterrestrial believers claimed that the authorities covered up the event.
- Project Ozma had become the catalyst for a graduate student at Cornell named Carl Sagan to contact Drake, which led to a lifelong collaboration between the two astronomers.
DRAKE’S DISCOVERIES
- Drake mapped the Milky Way galaxy for the first time using the radio frequencies arriving from the Milky Way’s center. It was his first achievement as an astronomer.
- Frank Drake and Hein Hvatum discovered that Jupiter has a radiation belt similar to the Earth’s Van Allen Belt.
- Frank Drake also discovered that Venus’ atmosphere is about as thick as the ocean on Earth, making its high temperatures the same between day and night, and its winds move at just a few miles an hour.
- Drake devised an equation called Drake’s Equation, meant to estimate the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way.
- The equation became an icon in science, particularly astronomy and even more particularly in SETI or search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
- The equation made him part of the league of scientists that includes Albert Einstein and James Clark Maxwell.
COMMUNICATING WITH ALIENS
- In 1963, Drake was offered the position of section chief of Lunar and Planetary Science at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena. He resigned a year later and complained that the growing administrative work in JPL hindered his research.
- He returned to Cornell University as an astronomy professor and worked as director of Cornell’s enormous radio telescope at Aricebo between 1966-1968. While working there, he coined the word pulsar for a new type of star discovered by Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Anthony Hewish.
- In 1974, Drake developed a coded message consisting of zeros and ones to transmit to the globular star cluster M13. The message consisted of the binary coding convention, atomic numbers of the main chemical in DNA, nucleotides and helical backbone of DNA, number of nucleotides in the red animal’s genes. It also sent a message about the total human population, typical height of humans, solar system with Earth’s position, Arecibo radio telescope, and Arecibo telescope size.
- M13 will receive the message about 25,000 light-years away from Earth.
- Two years earlier, he and Carl Sagan designed Pioneer Plaques, a pair of gold-anodized aluminum plaques that show nude figures of human male and female with symbols designed to provide information on where it came from.
- It was attached to Pioneer 10 in 1972 and Pioneer 11 in 1973 and sent to space. Pioneer 10 lost its contact with Earth in 2003 when its radio transmitter lost power, and Pioneer 11 in 1995.
- Drake and Sagan collaborated again to plan the message the Voyager spacecraft would carry. This time, Drake chose to send music on a phonograph record. It was eventually known as the Golden Record.
- The two astronomers included 100 images and about 90 minutes of audio, including music, whale songs, heart beating, people talking, and various other sounds.
- Voyager 1 is currently on 137 astronomical units from Earth, while Voyager 2 is 113 astronomical units. It is expected to reach Sirius, the brightest star seen from Earth in 296,000 years.
PERSONAL LIFE
- Frank Drake was married to a composer, Elizabeth Bell, and had three sons, Paul, Stephen, and Richard. Paul became a photographer while the other two became musicians.
- He got married for the second time to Amahl at Cornell, with whom he had two daughters, Nadia, now a science journalist, and Leila, who became a ballet dancer.
- He stayed at Cornell for twenty years before moving to California in 1984 to become a Professor of Astronomy and the Dean of Natural Sciences at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
- He is currently an Emeritus Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics and continues to serve on the Board of Trustees of the SETI Institute.
- He spent his spare time doing horticulture and lapidary.
Frank Drake Worksheets
This is a fantastic bundle which includes everything you need to know about Frank Drake across 25 in-depth pages. These are ready-to-use Frank Drake worksheets that are perfect for teaching students about Frank Drake who is an American astronomer and astrophysicist involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He is the founder of SETI, developer of the Drake Equation, and the Arecibo Message creator. He also coined the word “pulsar” to describe rapidly rotating neutron stars.
Complete List Of Included Worksheets
- Frank Drake Facts
- Drake’s Profile
- Drake’s Inquiry
- Project Ozma
- Drake’s Early Accomplishments
- Chosen Pictures
- Being an Astronomer
- Drake’s Fact or Bluff
- Astronomer’s Wisdom
- Are We Alone in the Universe?
- Your Own Pioneer Plaque
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