Jodrell Bank Observatory

Lovell Telescope

Jodrell Bank Observatory, formerly Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories or Jodrell Bank Experimental Station, location of one of the world’s largest fully steerable radio telescopes, which has a reflector that measures 76 metres (250 feet) in diameter. The telescope is located with other smaller radio telescopes at Jodrellbank (formerly Jodrell Bank), about 32 kilometres (20 miles) south of Manchester in the county of Cheshire, Eng. Immediately after World War II the British astronomer Alfred Charles Bernard Lovell, working at the University of Manchester’s botanical site at Jodrell Bank with war-surplus radar equipment, began research in radio and radar astronomy. Construction of the telescope began in 1952. Operation began shortly before the launching, on Oct. 4, 1957, by the Soviet Union of the first artificial Earth satellite (Sputnik I); and the satellite’s carrier rocket was tracked at Jodrell Bank by radar. Most of the operational time at Jodrell Bank is devoted to astronomy rather than to tracking and communication, but the telescope has been part of the tracking network for the United States program of space exploration and monitored most of the Soviet accomplishments. The Jodrell Bank telescope transmitted the first photographs from the surface of the Moon, received Feb. 6, 1966, by the Soviet Luna 9 probe. In 1987 the 76-metre telescope was renamed the Lovell Telescope. It and another telescope at Jodrell Bank are two elements of a seven-telescope array, the Multi-Element Radio Linked Interferometer Network (MERLIN), which uses microwave links to connect the individual telescopes into a radio interferometer 217 kilometres (135 miles) in diameter.