United Kingdom: Cheshire – Jodrell Bank

🔭 Jodrell Bank Observatory

For years, we’d been driving up and down the M6 — that great grey ribbon of tarmac stretching between Birmingham and Manchester — and every single time, we’d clock the signs for Jodrell Bank. “One day,” we’d say, “one day we must go there.” Well, one day finally arrived.

I’ve always had a bit of a love affair with physics, particularly astrophysics. It makes you feel simultaneously brilliant and utterly insignificant, which I find oddly comforting. Jodrell Bank played a pivotal role in the emergence of radio astronomy — a branch of science that, rather than peering at the cosmos through optical lenses, listens to it instead. Everything from gas giant planets to the violent hearts of galaxies gives off its own unique pattern of radio emissions, a sort of cosmic fingerprint. Radio astronomers can even pick up precisely ticking signals from dying stars — pulsars — spinning away in the darkness like some celestial metronome.

🏗️ The History of Jodrell Bank

Jodrell Bank Observatory — formerly the Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories — sits about 32 kilometres south of Manchester in the Cheshire countryside, home to one of the world’s largest fully steerable radio telescopes, its reflector measuring 76 metres across.

Immediately after the Second World War, British astronomer Alfred Charles Bernard Lovell arrived at the University of Manchester’s botanical site at Jodrell Bank, armed with war-surplus radar equipment — the sort that had been tracking enemy aircraft over the English Channel not long before. Wonderfully improvisational. Construction of the great telescope began in 1952, coming into operation in 1957, almost perfectly timed for one of the 20th century’s most dramatic moments. On 4th October 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, the first artificial Earth satellite, and its carrier rocket was tracked at Jodrell Bank by radar. This brand new telescope, barely warm, already at the centre of the Space Age.

The telescope went on to transmit the very first photographs received from the surface of the Moon — images from the Soviet Luna 9 probe on 6th February 1966. A field in Cheshire, relaying pictures from the Moon. In 1987, the telescope was formally renamed the Lovell Telescope, a thoroughly well-deserved honour. It now forms part of MERLIN — the Multi-Element Radio Linked Interferometer Network — a seven-telescope array stretching 217 kilometres in diameter. In 2019, Jodrell Bank was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage Site list. Quite right too.

🚗 Visiting Jodrell Bank

Finding Jodrell Bank was absolutely straightforward. The main telescope looks like a massive satellite dish — which, in essence, it is — and you can literally see it miles away, the occasional tree notwithstanding. Signage on the approach roads was excellent, so very little chance of getting lost.

The easiest way to get there is by car. Jodrell Bank is, by design, bang in the middle of nowhere, and there’s a very good reason for that. People are terribly noisy — not just the chatty variety, but in terms of radio emissions. TVs, microwave ovens, mobile phones — all of it generates radio noise interfering with faint signals from outer space. The Lovell Telescope is so extraordinarily sensitive it could pick up a mobile phone signal from the Moon. Makes you think twice about leaving yours on.

Once we arrived, there was plenty of parking. We headed straight for the Lovell Telescope. You can see it from a distance, obviously — it’s not exactly shy — but standing next to it, the sheer scale truly hits you. Incredibly, it can change its azimuth and rotate on tracks around its base, tracking objects as they move across the sky. Sadly, you cannot climb up into it, but getting up close was still a remarkable experience. Right next door is a small building with interactive multimedia exhibits explaining the work at Jodrell Bank and how radio astronomy works. Well worth a look.