Bernard Lovell

Bernard Lovell was an English physicist and radio astronomer who founded Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire, serving as its first director from 1945 to 1980 and building it into one of the world's leading centers for radio astronomy research. Lovell's most significant achievement was leading the construction of what was, on its completion in 1957, the largest fully steerable radio telescope in the world, an instrument later named the Lovell Telescope in his honor, which could be pointed to track any part of the visible sky rather than remaining fixed on a single patch, unlike many earlier radio telescope designs. The telescope proved its value almost immediately, being used to track the Soviet Sputnik and early American and Soviet space probes during the opening years of the space age, and it went on to make substantial ongoing contributions to the study of cosmic radio sources, pulsars and quasars over the following decades. Now more than six decades old, the Lovell Telescope remains in active scientific use, including as part of international networks of radio telescopes that combine their signals to achieve very high resolution imaging of distant astronomical objects.