Lovell Telescope
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- The dish tilts on gear racks salvaged from the 15-inch gun turrets of the battleships HMS Revenge and HMS Royal Sovereign.
- The whole telescope weighs about 3,200 tonnes, of which the bowl alone accounts for 1,500 tonnes.
- It turns on a circular railway track about 107 metres across, carried on wheels that have needed replacing only twice since 1957.
- The original plan was a wire mesh surface; switching to solid steel to catch the newly discovered 21 cm hydrogen line drove the costs up.
- During 1962–63 the telescope doubled as a secret early-warning radar for Soviet missiles, including during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
- In 1968 it tracked the Soviet Zond 5, which carried two tortoises around the Moon and back.
- In July 1969 it followed the Soviet Luna 15 probe in lunar orbit during the Apollo 11 landing.
- A gale in January 1976, with winds around 90 mph, came close to destroying the telescope.
- Observations of the double pulsar here helped confirm Einstein's general relativity to an accuracy of about 99.5 per cent.
- Wild peregrine falcons nest in its support towers, which helps keep pigeons away from the structure.
Why it is worth it
Rising above the Cheshire fields near Goostrey, the Lovell Telescope is the great white dish that made Jodrell Bank a household name. Its reflector is 76 metres (250 feet) across, and when it was completed in 1957 it was by a wide margin the largest steerable radio telescope in the world; today it is still the third largest. The instrument was conceived by Bernard Lovell of the University of Manchester, built to the design of the engineer Charles Husband, and known simply as the Mark I until it was renamed in Lovell's honour in 1987.
The project nearly ruined its creators: costs ran far above the budget and left the university with a crippling debt. Then, within days of the telescope entering service in October 1957, it tracked the rocket that had carried Sputnik 1 into orbit — the only instrument in the West able to do so by radar — and public and political attitudes shifted almost overnight. Over the following decade the dish followed Soviet and American space probes, and in February 1966 the Jodrell Bank team noticed that signals from the Soviet lander Luna 9 were in a standard newspaper facsimile format. Using a receiver borrowed from the Manchester office of the Daily Express, they printed the first picture from the surface of the Moon and it was published before Moscow had released its own.
The telescope's scientific record is at least as rich: it has been a workhorse of pulsar timing for decades, studied quasars and gravitational lenses, and is the largest element of the e-MERLIN array spread across England. Its surface was replaced in the early 2000s, and in 2019 Jodrell Bank Observatory was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as a landmark in the history of radio astronomy.
Getting there
Jodrell Bank is about 11 km from Sandbach, and Manchester Airport (MAN) is only around 13 km away, making it one of the most accessible major observatories in the world. The visitor attraction next to the telescope includes gardens, a path around the base of the dish and the First Light Pavilion, a grass-roofed building opened in 2022 whose 76-metre dome echoes the size of the Lovell dish and houses an exhibition and an immersive dome show. The observatory itself remains a working research site.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Lovell Telescope is a radio telescope at Jodrell Bank Observatory, near Goostrey, Cheshire, in the north-west of England. Completed in 1957, the telescope was the largest steerable dish radio telescope in the world at 76.2 metres in diameter; it is now the third-largest, after the US Green Bank telescope, and German Effelsberg telescope.
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