A BIT OF SCIENCE-- A BIT OF THE SCIENTIST-- X I I I --BERNARD LOVELL

  BERNARD LOVELL AND JODRELL BANK

                                       When Bernard Lovell first proposed building the telescope in Jodrell Bank in 1948, he estimated that it would cost around £60,000 to build. After work began in 1950, it was soon clear that these figures were wildly optimistic; and, in 1952, a more “realistic” sum of £333,000 was agreed on, to be shared equally between the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research and the Nuffield Foundation. The telescope ultimately cost £670,000 as the building work was plagued by strikes, bureaucratic delays, delivery failures and escalating raw material costs.  Lovell faced possible imprisonment for the alleged overspending of public money.
                                          The telescope came into operation on August 2 1957. Two months later the Soviets launched Sputnik 1, the first ever artificial satellite, and Lovell’s 250-ft-diameter device proved its worth as the only telescope in the western hemisphere capable of tracking it. The detection of Sputnik silenced the critics who had condemned the telescope as a costly and unnecessary white elephant. It produced not only the first trackings of Sputnik, but also its carrier rocket, the first ever intercontinental ballistic missile.
                                             From then on and for much of the Cold War, Jodrell Bank covered parts of the sky that Soviet, and often American, astronomers could not reach. When the American astronauts landed on the moon in 1969, it was Lovell who revealed that, despite promising that they would put nothing into orbit that would interfere with Apollo 11, the Russians had attempted to steal a march on the Americans by landing their own unmanned space probe, which had crashed on the moon shortly before the Americans arrived.
                                         It was Jodrell Bank’s contribution to astronomy that kept it in the forefront of science. As Director of Jodrell Bank Experimental Station  Lovell presided over a string of new and important discoveries which have shed light on the origins of the universe. In 1960 the telescope caught the first glimpse of quasars, mysterious star like objects which radiate with the violence of 100 million suns. Almost two-thirds of all known pulsars have been discovered by Jodrell Bank astronomers, from signals received from deep space; and radio echoes from the moon enabled Jodrell Bank scientists to give a new accuracy to measurement of the solar system. In 1960 Lovell pulled off a notable coup when the telescope was employed to transmit signals to the American Pioneer V deep space probe to release it from its carrier rocket — the only device capable of doing so at a distance of more than 22 million miles.
                                Alfred Charles Bernard Lovell was born on August 31 1913 in Gloucestershire, into a family whose life revolved around the church and the cricket pitch. His mother was one of the first women cricketers and, in his village team, the young Bernard played in a side composed mostly of relatives. Cricket remained an abiding passion but he remained true to his upbringing and never played or watched the game on the Sabbath.
                                  Lovell was educated at Kingswood Grammar School, Bristol, and studied Physics at the University of Bristol under Arthur Mannering Tyndall. After graduation, he stayed on to take a doctorate; then, in 1936, he moved to Manchester, where he took a one-year appointment as assistant lecturer in Physics. In 1937 he became a member of the university’s cosmic ray research team under Professor Patrick  Blackett, working in this capacity until the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, when he published his first book, Science and Civilisation.
                                     During the war Lovell was drafted in to help the Air Ministry research the use of radar for detection and navigation purposes. Working with the Telecommunications  Research Establishment, first  in Dorset and later at Malvern, Lovell was in charge of a team developing “blind bombing” radar systems which enabled night fighters to locate enemy aircraft, improved the aim of bombers during night raids, and enabled Coastal Command aircraft to detect submarines surfacing under cover of darkness — a development which dramatically cut back shipping losses in the Atlantic.For his wartime work, Lovell was appointed OBE in 1946.

                                     During his early wartime work, Lovell had suggested to Blackett (who would serve during the war as Director of Operational Research at the Admiralty), that the rapid and transient echoes seen by coastal defence and airborne radar might be reflections from cosmic ray showers. Together they drew up a famous paper, Radio, echoes and cosmic ray showers, published in 1941. The echoes turned out to be not from cosmic rays but from meteors, and their work soon demonstrated that the belief that sporadic meteors come from outside the solar system was wrong. Meteors are pieces of debris that circle the sun. Radar enabled much fainter and even daytime meteors to be detected. Lovell later wrote Meteor Astronomy , a classic textbook on the subject.
                                            Soon afterwards the University of Manchester agreed to provide him with a permanent establishment at the Jodrell Bank site, and also to sponsor the construction of his first radio telescope. In recognition of his work, he was appointed Senior Lecturer in 1947, Reader in 1949 and then finally Professor of Radio Astronomy in 1951, a position he held until 1980.Lovell frankly admitted that it was mainly the prospect of using the new radio telescope to track the first Sputnik, scheduled for launch by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957, that spurred his efforts to complete the instrument by that time. By supplying a much-needed boost to the prestige of the project at a time when it was being seriously threatened by rapidly rising costs, this application of the instrument guaranteed its success and Lovell’s personal fame. Ever since, the giant radio telescope at Jodrell Bank has been a vital tool for pinpointing the exact locations of Earth satellites, space probes, and manned spaceflights, as well as for collecting data transmitted by instruments in some of these vehicles. The telescope was originally called the Mark 1 but was renamed the Lovell Telescope in 1987.
                                            Lovell proved immensely capable both as an astronomer and as an ambassador for his country and for science. He wrote a number of lively and popular books, and in 1958 was chosen to give the BBC Reith Lectures, which were published a year later under the title The Individual and the Universe. Other works include Radio Astronomy, The Exploration of Outer Space , The Story of Jodrell Bank, Emerging Cosmology  and an autobiography, Astronomer by Chance .
                                            In retirement, Lovell continued to spend many afternoons at Jodrell Bank, and found time to indulge his passion for cricket. He served as president of Lancashire County Cricket Club and in 1985 was drafted in by the Test and County Cricket Board to investigate electronic aids for umpires.A keen musician, he played the organ in his parish church of Swettenham in Cheshire and served as president of the Incorporated Guild of Church Musicians. 
                                       Lovell received a number of honorary degrees from various academic institutions as well as honorary membership in several academies and organizations. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society  in 1955, receiving its Royal Medal in 1960. He was knighted in 1961. From 1969 to 1971 he was president of the Royal Astronomical Society  and he received the Society’s Gold Medal in 1981.
Professor Sir Bernard Lovell, born August 31 1913, died on August 6 2012.


                         

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