page_title: Jodrell Bank Observatory
section_title: Lovell Telescope
hierarchical_section_title: Jodrell Bank Observatory / Lovell Telescope
caption_attribution_description: Lovell Telescope, Jodrell Bank Observatory
context_page_description: The Jodrell Bank Observatory – originally the Jodrell Bank Experimental Station and from 1966 to 1999, the Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories – hosts a number of radio telescopes, and is part of the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Manchester. The observatory was established in 1945 by Bernard Lovell, a radio astronomer at the University of Manchester to investigate cosmic rays after his work on radar during the Second World War. It has since played an important role in the research of meteoroids, quasars, pulsars, masers and gravitational lenses, and was heavily involved with the tracking of space probes at the start of the Space Age. The managing director of the observatory is Professor Simon Garrington.
  The main telescope at the observatory is the Lovell Telescope. Its diameter of 250 ft makes it the third largest steerable radio telescope in the world. There are three other active telescopes at the observatory; the Mark II, and 42 ft and 7 m diameter radio telescopes.
context_section_description: The "Mark I" telescope, now known as the Lovell Telescope, was the world's largest steerable dish radio telescope, 76.2 metres (250 ft) in diameter, when it was constructed in 1957; it is now the third largest, after the Green Bank telescope in West Virginia and the Effelsberg telescope in Germany. Part of the gun turret mechanisms from the battleships HMS Revenge and HMS Royal Sovereign were reused in the telescope's motor system. The telescope became operational in mid-1957, in time for the launch of the Soviet Union's Sputnik 1, the world's first artificial satellite. The telescope was the only one able to track Sputnik's booster rocket by radar; first locating it just before midnight on 12 October 1957, eight days after launch.
  In the following years, the telescope tracked various space probes. Between 11 March and 12 June 1960, it tracked the United States' NASA-launched Pioneer 5 probe. The telescope sent commands to the probe, including those to separate it from its carrier rocket and turn on its more powerful transmitter when the probe was eight million miles away. It received data from the probe, the only telescope in the world capable of doing so. In February 1966, Jodrell Bank was asked by the Soviet Union to track its unmanned moon lander Luna 9 and recorded on its facsimile transmission of photographs from the moon's surface. The photographs were sent to the British press and published before the Soviets made them public.
  In 1969, the Soviet Union's Luna 15 was also tracked. A recording of the moment when Jodrell Bank's scientists observed the mission was released on 3 July 2009.
  With the support of Sir Bernard Lovell, the telescope tracked Russian satellites. Satellite and space probe observations were shared with the US Department of Defense satellite tracking research and development activity at Project Space Track.
  Tracking space probes only took a fraction of the Lovell telescope's observing time and the remainder used for scientific observations including using radar to measure the distance to the moon and to Venus; observations of astrophysical masers around star-forming regions and giant stars; observations of pulsars (including the discovery of millisecond pulsars and the first pulsar in a globular cluster); observations of quasars and gravitational lenses (including the detection of the first gravitational lens and the first Einstein ring). The telescope has been used for SETI observations.
caption: The Lovell Telescope
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