Jodrell Bank Observatory

• Official name: Jodrell Bank Observatory
• Location: Cheshire County, England
• Type: Cultural
• Year of inscription: 2019

The Jodrell Bank Observatory consists of a series of radio telescopes located in rural northwestern England. Jodrell Bank is one of the pioneering observatories in radio astronomy, the science of studying the sky through radio waves. It was founded in 1945 to detect cosmic rays and was briefly used as an early warning system for potential Soviet missile launches. In the early days of space exploration, its telescopes were among the few on Earth that could track spacecraft and were involved in monitoring the first moon landing in 1969. Over the years, Jodrell Bank grew to become an indispensable tool in observing objects both within our solar system and the depths of space.

Jodrell Bank’s 2019 inclusion on the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage list recognizes its status as one of the defining achievements in the history of radio astronomy. The observatory’s signature telescope is its largest, the 250-foot (76-meter) wide Lovell Telescope, named after the observatory’s founder, Sir Bernard Lovell. The telescope was the largest steerable radio telescope in the world at the time of its construction in 1957 and remained the third-largest of its kind into the 2020s.

History

The science of using radio waves to detect distant objects developed during the early twentieth century and eventually evolved to become the radar systems used by both sides during World War II (1939–1945). Bernard Lovell, a physicist at the University of Manchester in northwestern England, worked on aircraft radar systems during the war and believed the technology could prove useful in the field of astronomy. Lovell wanted to use radio waves to detect cosmic rays, high-energy charged particles from space that constantly impact Earth. His experiments at the University of Manchester were hampered by interference from the city’s electric tram cars, so in December 1945, he took his equipment out to a university-owned site in the English countryside. The site was known as Jodrell Bank, named after William Jauderell, a fourteenth-century English soldier and archer. Lovell did not detect evidence of cosmic rays but instead discovered several meteors, small rocky bodies that burn up in Earth’s atmosphere.

Lovell was soon joined by several other scientists at the site, which was originally named the Jodrell Bank Experimental Station. By 1947, they had built the Searchlight Aerial, a rotating radar array to search for meteors, and the 218-foot (66-meter) Transit Telescope, which detected radio waves from the Andromeda Galaxy—the closest galaxy to the Milky Way. Although the early work at the site was a success, Lovell wanted to construct an even larger telescope that could be steered and pointed to any part of the sky. He worked with engineer Charles Husband to design a 250-foot (76-meter) radio telescope known as the Mark 1.

Work on the telescope began in 1952, but the project soon ran into several design roadblocks and was seriously over budget. The telescope was in jeopardy of losing funding and only partially operational by October 1957 when the Soviet Union launched into orbit Sputnik 1, the world’s first artificial satellite. As the only telescope on Earth that could detect the missile launch that put the satellite into orbit, the Mark 1 suddenly became a priority for the British government. Within weeks, the telescope was fully operational. At the time, the Mark 1 was the largest radio telescope ever built. It remains the world’s third-largest steerable radio telescope as of the mid-2020s. In 1987, the telescope was renamed the Lovell Telescope in honor of the observatory’s founder.

For the first six years of its operation, the Mark 1 also served as a secret early-warning system for Soviet missile launches. During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the telescope remained focused in the direction of the Soviet Union for ten straight days. It was also used to track US and Soviet space launches throughout the 1960s. In 1966, scientists at Jodrell Bank were able to monitor the Soviet probe Luna 9, which landed on the moon’s surface. In July 1969, the telescope helped track the Apollo 11 mission, the first human landing on the moon. When the lunar lander touched down on the moon’s surface, Jodrell Bank was able to listen in to the astronauts’ transmissions.

However, Jodrell Bank’s true success was in its main purpose of studying the heavens. The telescopes at the facility played a role in the discovery of several milestones in astronomy during the twentieth century. They were instrumental in detecting cosmic background radiation, the “glow” left over from the universe’s creation in the Big Bang. Observations at Jodrell Bank also played a large role in the discovery of quasars, extremely powerful bursts of energy believed to be caused by supermassive black holes at the heart of young, distant galaxies.

Jodrell Bank still plays a major part in astronomical research into the twenty-first century. The Lovell Telescope has been upgraded several times since its construction and was still operational as of 2022. The Lovell Telescope is one of four active telescopes at Jodrell Bank. The second largest, the Mark II, was built on the site of the Transit Telescope in 1964. The Mark II has a diameter of 125 feet by 83 feet (38 meters by 25 meters). The other telescopes at the observatory are 42 feet (13 meters) and 23 feet (7 meters).

In 2012, Jodrell Bank was named as the location of an office for the Square Kilometre Array, an international project that will construct the world’s largest radio telescope on two sites in South Africa and Australia. In 2019, it was made the project's headquarters. Jodrell’s Lovell and Mark II telescopes are also part of the Multi-Element Radio Linked Interferometer Network (MERLIN) that links together seven radio telescopes across England and Wales. Jodrell Bank is also part of the European Very Long Baseline Interferometry, participated in Cosmic Microwave Background studies, and, in 2022, opened the First Light Pavilion, a museum dedicated to its history and accomplishments.

Significance

Prior to the 1930s, astronomers studied the sky primarily through optical telescopes, instruments that can only detect light in the visible band of the electromagnetic spectrum. During that decade, scientists realized that our Milky Way galaxy was emitting radio waves, a section of the electromagnetic spectrum with longer wavelengths and shorter frequencies. This allowed astronomers to view the universe in a whole new light and see what optical astronomy could not. The first telescopes at Jodrell Bank were built in the infancy of radio astronomy, and with the construction of the Lovell Telescope, the observatory became one of the most important sites in the emerging science. At the time of the telescope’s construction, Britain’s New Scientist magazine called it the nation’s “greatest scientific instrument.”

The United Kingdom first submitted Jodrell Bank to UNESCO for consideration as a World Heritage Site in 2010. Nine years later, UNESCO announced that the observatory had made the list. UNESCO uses ten criteria to determine if a site warrants inclusion on the World Heritage list. To merit inclusion, a site must meet one of the criteria; Jodrell Bank met four.

The observatory is seen as “a masterpiece of human creative genius,” representing the entire history of radio astronomy from its infancy to modern day. The innovative telescopes designed by Lovell and his fellow scientists led to many ground-breaking discoveries and paved the way for further advancements. Similarly, Jodrell Bank meets another UNESCO criterion as an “important interchange of human values over a span of time and on a global scale.” This criterion recognizes the observatory’s position at the forefront of radio astronomy and the many contributions it has made during the past seventy-plus years.

The third UNESCO criterion met by Jodrell Bank is that the observatory represents technology that “illustrates a significant stage in human history,” specifically the period from the 1940s through the 1960s. This period marked the transitional boundary from purely optical astronomy to the use of radio waves, x-rays, and other forms of electromagnetic radiation in studying the universe. It also represented the era of “big science,” when governments and universities began investing in large-scale, expensive scientific projects.

The fourth and final criterion declares that Jodrell Bank is directly “associated with events and ideas of outstanding universal significance.” This criterion is also tied to the observatory’s legacy as a pioneering structure in radio astronomy but focuses more on its role in introducing methods of astronomy that revolutionized the science and gave humans a better understanding of the universe.

Although the four active telescopes at Jodrell Bank still conduct important scientific research, they are also tourist attractions and receive thousands of visitors a year. UNESCO notes that many of the old, disused, or retired instruments and structures still exist in some form and are maintained and well-preserved into the 2020s. For example, while the Transit Telescope was replaced in the 1960s, parts of it remain on site. In addition, the surviving pieces of the Searchlight Aerial are preserved at the observatory as one of its protected structures.

Bibliography

Gill, Victoria, and Lynette Horsburgh. “Moon Landing: How Jodrell Bank Tracked Apollo 11 and a Russian Probe.” BBC, 19 July 2019, www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-manchester-49001181. Accessed 27 Nov. 2024.

“History and Heritage.” Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, www.jodrellbank.manchester.ac.uk/about/history-and-heritage. Accessed 27 Nov. 2024.

Levesque, Emily. “How Radio Astronomy Reveals the Universe.” Quanta Magazine, 13 Apr. 2021, www.quantamagazine.org/how-radio-astronomy-reveals-the-universe-20210413. Accessed 27 Nov. 2024.

“Jodrell Bank: Five Amazing Things About the Famous UK Observatory.” BBC, 20 July 2019, www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/49046599. Accessed 27 Nov. 2024.

“Jodrell Bank Observatory.” UNESCO World Heritage Centre, whc.unesco.org/en/list/1594. Accessed 27 Nov. 2024.

“The Name Behind the Telescope: Sir Bernard Lovell.” The University of Manchester, 17 July 2019, www.mub.eps.manchester.ac.uk/science-engineering/2019/07/17/the-name-behind-the-telescope-sir-bernard-lovell. Accessed 27 Nov. 2024.

“The Square Kilometre Array (SKA).” The University of Manchester, www.jodrellbank.manchester.ac.uk/research/groups/square-kilometre-array. Accessed 27 Nov. 2024.

“The Story of Jodrell Bank.” Jodrell Bank, www.jodrellbank.net/explore/heritage/the-story-of-jodrell-bank. Accessed 27 Nov. 2024.

Wong, Sam. “Jodrell Bank Observatory Honoured With UNESCO World Heritage Status.” New Scientist, 8 July 2019, www.newscientist.com/article/2208965-jodrell-bank-observatory-honoured-with-unesco-world-heritage-status. Accessed 27 Nov. 2024.