Jodrell Bank Observatory - Lovell Telescope

Lovell Telescope

The "Mark I" telescope, now known as the Lovell Telescope, was the largest steerable dish radio telescope in the world, 76.2 metres (250 ft) in diameter, when it was completed in 1957; it is now the third largest, after the Green Bank and Effelsberg telescopes. Part of the gun turret mechanisms from the battleships HMS Revenge and Royal Sovereign were reused in the motor system for the telescope. The telescope became operational in mid-1957, just in time for the launch of Sputnik 1, the world's first artificial satellite. The telescope was the only one in the world able to track Sputnik's booster rocket by radar; first locating it just before midnight on 12 October 1957.

In the following years, the telescope was used to track a variety of space probes. Between 11 March and 12 June 1960, it tracked the Pioneer 5 probe. The telescope was also used to send commands to the probe, including the one to separate the probe from its carrier rocket and the ones to turn on the more powerful transmitter when the probe was eight million miles away. It also received data from the probe, being the only telescope in the world capable of doing so at the time. In February 1966, Jodrell Bank tracked the USSR unmanned moon lander Luna 9 and listened in on its facsimile transmission of photographs from the moon's surface. The photos were sent to the British press and published before the Soviets themselves had made the photos 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 personal support of Sir Bernard Lovell, the telescope also 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.

Despite the publicity surrounding the telescope's tracking of space probes, this only took up a fraction of its observing time, with the remainder used for scientific observations. These include 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 also been used for SETI observations.