Lovell Telescope

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 (250 feet) in diameter; it is now the third-largest, after the US Green Bank telescope, and German Effelsberg telescope. Originally known as the "250 ft telescope" or the Radio Telescope at Jodrell Bank, it became the Mark I telescope from 1960 as future telescopes (the Mark II, III, and IV) began design. It was renamed the Lovell Telescope in 1987 after Sir Bernard Lovell, and became a Grade I listed building in 1988. The telescope forms part of the MERLIN and European VLBI Network arrays of radio telescopes. The telescope was influential in the early detections of extragalactic objects including quasars, astrophysical masers, and Einstein rings. Soviet and US probes of the Space Race were tracked en route to the Moon, Venus, and Mars; in 1966 it received the first imagery from the Moon's surface taken by Luna 9. At a height of the Cold War in 1962 and 1963, the telescope operated as an early-warning radar of the four-minute warning system for the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces. Both Bernard Lovell and Charles Husband were knighted for their roles in creating the telescope. In September 2006, the telescope won the BBC's online competition to find the UK's greatest "Unsung Landmark". The telescope is visible from Manchester Airport, high-rise buildings in Manchester such as the Beetham Tower, and distant vantage points such as the Pennines, Winter Hill, Snowdonia, Beeston Castle, and the Peak District.

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