Public Lectures for the Session 2002-2003 held in Room E7 of the Renold Building, UMIST.
Delivered to the Manchester Astronomical Society

19th September 2002

''Jodrell Bank-Looking forward to a bright future''

Dr Ian Morison
Operations Manager, Jodrell Bank

Dr Morison began with a fascinating account of the early years of Jodrell Bank that began shortly after WWII when Dr Bernard Lovell was obliged to set up an ex-army radar unit in a muddy field in Cheshire, to escape radio interference from Manchester trams, in his cosmic ray research. He never did complete the work but instead discovered, with amateur help from J.M. Prentice, of the BAA Meteor Section, that radar could detect echoes from meteors entering the earth's atmosphere. Within a decade, and after great financial difficulties that threatened to bankrupt the project, in 1957 Jodrell boasted the world's largest fully-steerable 250ft radio telescope, now called the Lovell telescope.

This instrument was refurbished as the Mark-1A in 1971 with a shallower, more accurately figured reflecting surface and strengthened supporting frame but the surface has since deteriorated. Nevertheless, the discovery rate at Jodrell has been immense, particularly of pulsars, the rapidly rotating cores of collapsed stars that 'tick' like clocks at radio wavelengths.

Other radio telescopes were constructed, first the Mark II elliptical telescope in an adjacent field and then other integrated units that now form the Multi-Element Radio Interferometer Network, MERLIN. Its synthesized aperture is equal in resolution to that of the Hubble Space Telescope.

Five years ago Jodrell Bank was in financial difficulties. £10M was needed to refurbish the ageing instruments. PPARC has since granted funds to resurface the Lovell telescope to unprecedented accuracy that allows shorter wavelength studies. This work is finished. The next upgrade is the replacement of microwave communication between the MERLIN telescopes with optical cable broadband links that not only allow greater data transfer rates but also will improve sensitivity thirty-fold. Digital data analysis is high priority and is part-funded by selling state of art cryostat receiver technology to other radio observatories worldwide.

Ian Morison illustrated his talk with slides and a digital presentation. He concluded with an overview of current and future radio astronomy projects around the world such as SETI, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), and the Square Kilometer Array (SKA). Each was designed for specific tasks and ever-higher sensitivity.

Synopsis by Kevin J. Kilburn (Secretary)

Maintained by Michael Oates
Page modified 28 October, 2006