The radio astronomer and astrophysicist Frank Drake, who has died aged 92, was a pioneer of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He carried out the first search for signals from extraterrestrial civilisations, Project Ozma, in 1960 and shortly afterwards invented the “Drake equation”, which estimates the number of extraterrestrial civilisations in our galaxy.
As a radio astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, he made the first observations of Jupiter’s radiation belts, analogous to the Van Allen belts around the Earth, and was one of the first astronomers to measure the intense surface temperature on Venus, a consequence of the greenhouse effect of its thick atmosphere. But it is for Project Ozma, named after Princess Ozma in L Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz books and carried out with Green Bank’s 85ft radio telescope, that he will be remembered.
