Engineering: A bluffer's guide to Jodrell Bank

The Lovell Telescope: Facts & Figures

Mass of the telescope: 3,200 tonnesMass of bowl: 1,500 tonnesDiameter of bowl: 76.2 metresSurface area of bowl: 5,270 square metresAmount of paint for three coats: 5,300 litresMaximum height above ground: 89.0 metresOuter diameter of railway track: 107.5 metres

When it was built in 1957 it was the largest in the world. It cost £750,000 and was three times over budget.

It is now the third largest movable telescope in the world after the Effelsberg Radio Telescope in Germany and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia. Both are 100 metres in diameter.

The largest fixed telescope is the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, which is 305 metres across.

The Jodrell Bank site is named after a local stream. Jodrell is the family name of an archer at the battle of Agincourt who was rewarded by the crown with land.

The Lovell telescope is so sensitive that using mobile phones on the site is forbidden. Even the microwave in the staff tea room is shielded inside a metal box to prevent interference.

The e-Merlin upgrade has cost £8m in new hardware (mainly installing fibre optic cables) and will cost £2.5m per year to run.

Jodrell Bank in popular culture

In a 1981 episode of Doctor Who, the Doctor's fourth incarnation, played by Tom Baker, fell to his death from a walkway at the Lovell telescope. He regenerated into Peter Davison.

In Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Jodrell Bank scientists missed the alien invasion because they were having a cup of tea.

The Lovell telescope won the BBC's "unsung landmark" competition in 2006.

In the 1953 sci-fi serial The Quatermass Experiment, the central character – Bernard – is said to have been named after Sir Bernard Lovell, Jodrell Bank's founder.

Jodrell's greatest hits

In its first year of operation, 1957, the Lovell telescope – or Mark 1 as it was then known – tracked the ballistic missile that had blasted the Soviet Sputnik 1 satellite into space. The Ministry of Defence later secretly used Lovell as a nuclear missile tracking station.

Lovell had a major role in the discovery and identification of quasars (QUASi-stellAR radio source). These are thought to be powered by the accretion of dust and other material into super-massive black holes at the centre of distant galaxies.

Lovell was instrumental in demonstrating gravitational lensing – the warping of space-time around massive objects. This discovery is a major plank in the evidence for Einstein's general theory of relativity.

Astronomers have used the telescope to carry out a detailed investigation of pulsars (pulsating stars). These are thought to be extremely dense remnants of stars left over from supernova explosions. They rotate and emit a beam of radio waves, rather like a lighthouse.

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