Frank Drake

Frank Drake was an American astrophysicist and astrobiologist who devised the Drake equation in 1961, a formula for estimating the number of detectable extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way that has been called the second most famous equation in science after Einstein mass energy equivalence. In 1960 he led Project Ozma, the first systematic search for radio signals from other civilizations, observing the nearby stars Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani. In 1974 he designed and transmitted the Arecibo message, the first interstellar message deliberately sent from Earth, and he co-designed the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record with Carl Sagan as physical messages meant for any civilization that might one day recover the spacecraft carrying them. Drake worked at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory from 1958 to 1963, where he discovered Jupiter ionosphere and magnetosphere, was a faculty member at Cornell University from 1964 to 1984, and founded the SETI Institute in 1984, later directing the Carl Sagan Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1972.