Frank Drake Orbituary

Frank Drake was an astronomer and astrophysicist from the United States. Frank Drake was born on May 28, 1930, in Chicago, Illinois.

Frank Drake was involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, including the establishment of SETI, mounting the first observational attempts at detecting extraterrestrial communications in Project Ozma in 1960.

Frank Drake also developed the Drake equation and developed the Arecibo Message, a digital encoding of an astronomical and biological description of the Earth and its lifeforms for transmission into the cosmos.

He was an emeritus professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he was also dean of Natural Sciences (1984–1988). He was a trustee of the SETI Institute.

Frank Drake passed away on September 2, 2022, at his home in Aptos, California, from natural causes at the age of 92.

Drake is survived by his wife, Amahl, and two daughters, as well as three children from a previous marriage.