Jodrell Bank Observatory
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How it came to be
In 1945 Bernard Lovell of the University of Manchester acquired surplus wartime army radar to study cosmic rays. Interference from trams in the city spoiled his work, so on 10 December he moved the equipment to Jodrell Bank, university-owned farmland outside Manchester, and switched the radar on for the first time on 14 December, at the peak of the Geminid meteor shower.
A 66-metre transit telescope followed in 1947, then the largest radio telescope in the world, and it detected radio emission from the Andromeda galaxy. In 1957 the 76-metre Lovell Telescope was completed, the largest steerable dish of its time. On 12 October that year it became the only telescope able to track by radar the rocket that had launched the Soviet Sputnik 1.
In 1966, at Soviet request, it received the picture signals from the Luna 9 lunar probe, and the photos appeared in the British press before the Soviets released them. The observatory was inscribed in 2019 as a record of the shift from optical to radio astronomy.
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