Michael Julian Drake

Michael Julian Drake (July 8, 1946 – September 21, 2011), regent's professor, was the director of the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and head of the Department of Planetary Sciences. He was the principal investigator of the Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) mission of NASA's New Frontiers Program. The OSIRIS-REx mission, launched on September 8, 2016, and scheduled to arrive at Asteroid Bennu in December 2018, is the most ambitious University of Arizona planetary science project to date and will retrieve a sample of the asteroid and return it to Earth. He also made significant contributions to the study of HED meteorites and studied the origin of water in terrestrial planets.