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Jodrell Bank`s telescopes look to brighter future

January 18, 2002

After nearly 9 months of unseen activity, the University of Manchester`s giant Lovell radio telescope at Jodrell Bank is now scanning the heavens again, but anyone looking across the Cheshire plain may notice that it now looks rather odd! The well known landmark is now well on the way to the completion of a £2.4 M upgrade that will greatly enhance its performance and keep it at the forefront of astronomical research for many years to come.

A major part of the upgrade is the replacement of the steel panels that make up the 250-ft diameter reflecting surface. The panels had begun to rust badly and threatened the structural integrity of the surface. Following the replacement of a trial section in 1999, work to replace them with galvanized steel plates began in earnest in March of last year with the objective of replacing half the surface area during the summer months. In fact, the fine autumn weather allowed the work to continue until the end of October and has enabled two thirds of the surface to be completed.

Over much of the surface, the original panel segments alternate with the new unpainted metal panels. In the light of the dawn Sun the old panels, stained with rust released when their neighbours were removed, look almost red in colour and give an overall impression not unlike the Japanese flag! The remaining third is fully resurfaced. Overall the effect is somewhat bizarre but does not affect its present performance in any way.

The work will resume in March this year and should be completed by mid summer 2002. Then, the task of cleaning and painting the bowl to give a pristine white surface can begin. Each panel will then be precisely positioned to accurately follow the required parabolic shape. This process, using laser and holographic measurement techniques, will enable the new, smoother, surface to be set to far higher precision than the old thus allowing it to operate at shorter wavelengths and greatly extending the scientific capability of the telescope.

During the latter months of 2001, the telescope was given a new drive system that now provides sophisticated control to each of the ten motors that move the telescope to follow radio sources across the sky. The improved `tracking` capability will be required to keep the radio sources in the far narrower `beam` of the telescope when operated over its extended frequency range.

Once completed, the reborn Lovell Telescope will immediately be able to make an important contribution to the Jodrell Bank Observatory`s other major instrument, the 217-km MERLIN array. This links together 7 antennas stretching from the Welsh borders to Cambridge to build up the effect of a giant radio telescope providing images with the same detail as the Hubble Space Telescope. Christmas brought the news that the MERLIN array is itself to undergo a major upgrade in performance which, when using the Lovell Telescope, will improve its sensitivity by a factor of 30. The enhanced instrument, to be known as e-MERLIN, will be able to probe far deeper into the Universe, achieving in one day what would currently take 3 years of continuous observation.

As Professor Andrew Lyne, Director of the Jodrell Bank Observatory, said: "The combination of the upgraded Lovell Telescope and e-MERLIN will give the Observatory two of the world`s major research instruments and keep UK astronomers at the leading edge of astronomy well into this century."

Royal Astronomical Society (RAS)