He was the first to suggest the use of an active scintillation shield operated in electronic anticoincidence with the primary detector to reduce the background from cosmic ray interactions, an innovation that made sensitive hard X-ray and gamma-ray astronomy possible.

Frost received the John C. Lindsay Memorial Award in 1982 for his role as Project Scientist and one of the prime instigators of the Solar Maximum Mission (SMM).

He graduated in 1952 from Holy Trinity Diocesan High School (then in Brooklyn, now in Hicksville, NY) and obtained a Bachelor of Science degree from Manhattan College in New York City.

He participated in the graduate program in the Physics Department of the University of Rochester in upstate New York for one year but left in 1958 before completing his PhD to take up a position with NASA.

He was one of the early hires of this new agency and worked first at the Naval Research Laboratory and then at the newly opened Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD.

Frost also held the position of head of the Solar High Energy Branch for several years and later contributed to defining Goddard's involvement in early scientific endeavors aboard the Space Station.

[6] At the start of the space program in the late fifties and early sixties, there was the recognition that X-rays and gamma-rays, not detectable from the ground, offered a new window on the universe.

Hence, there was a great demand for flying ever-improving X-ray and gamma-ray instruments to determine the intensity and spectrum of the emission from the Sun and other more distant cosmic sources of this radiation.

Frost was the first to suggest the use of an active scintillation shield around the X-ray/gamma-ray detector with the two connected in electronic anticoincidence to reject unwanted charged particle events and to provide the required angular collimation.

"[10] Actively shielded X-ray and gamma-ray spectrometers of this type became the standard for making high sensitivity observations of solar and cosmic sources, and variations on this basic technique are still being used today.