Built in 1957, the 76.2-metre Lovell telescope remains the third largest fully steerable radio telescope in the world. It is the largest radio telescope of the Jodrell Bank Observatory as well as the largest in the UK. During all these years many upgrades have taken place, the most recent being the 2000-2002 upgrade in which the whole reflecting surface was changed. It is used in a wide area of observational projects, including pulsars, quasars, masers, gravitational lensing and is a key part of MERLIN and the European VLBI network. The majority of observations with the Lovell telescope are at 1.4 GHz. The bandwidth of this receiver is in the process of being increased to 300 MHz. It uses a large-bandwidth digital filterbank backend for pulsar observations. This provides the high-resolution needed to perform the precise timing of millisecond pulsars, especially for those used in the Pulsar Timing Array. Please visit the Lovell radio telescope wesbite for more information. |
