Sir Alfred Charles Bernard Lovell, usually known as Bernard Lovell, was a radio astronomer and the founder and director of Jodrell Bank Experimental Station, now known as Jodrell Bank Observatory. Born in Gloucestershire in 1913, he attended the University of Bristol, obtaining his PhD in 1936. After a year as an assistant lecturer in physics at the University of Manchester, he became a member of the cosmic-ray research team at the University of Manchester, where he remained until the outbreak of World War II, when he published his first book, 'Science and Civilization'. During World War II Lovell worked for the Air Ministry, doing valuable research in the use of radar for detection and navigation purposes for which he was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1946. On returning to the University of Manchester in 1945 as a lecturer in physics, Lovell acquired a surplus army radar set for use in his research on cosmic rays. Because interference from the city hampered his efforts, he moved the equipment, which included a searchlight base, to Jodrell Bank, an open field located about 20 miles south of Manchester. Shortly afterward the university agreed to provide him with a permanent establishment at the site and to sponsor the construction of his first radio telescope. Lovell was appointed senior lecturer at the University of Manchester in 1947 and reader in 1949; from 1951 to 1980 he was professor of radio astronomy at the university. During this time, he had already begun planning and building a bigger and more sophisticated radio telescope, which, when it was completed in 1957, was the world’s largest of its kind, with a diameter of 250 feet. The structure rotates horizontally at 20° per minute, and the reflector itself moves vertically at 24° per minute. While work on the telescope was in progress, Lovell published 'Radio Astronomy' (1952), 'Meteor Astronomy' (1954), and 'The Exploration of Space by Radio' (1957). Lovell's radio telescope was used to track the first Sputnik, guaranteeing both the success of the mission and Lovell's personal fame. Ever since, the 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. Because of the widespread publicity given to Jodrell Bank and its director, in 1958 the BBC invited Lovell to give a series of radio talks, known as the Reith Lectures, which were published in 1959 as 'The Individual and the Universe'. When Lovell was knighted in 1961 for his work in radio astronomy, 20 investigations—mostly on radio emissions originating thousands of millions of light-years away—were in progress at Jodrell Bank. Some of this work is discussed in his book 'The Exploration of Outer Space' (1962). His subsequent research was concerned mainly with cosmology; radio emissions from outer space, including those from pulsars (discovered in 1967); the measurement of the angular diameters of distant quasars; and flare stars. Lovell 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. He died in Swettenham, Cheshire, on 6 August 2012.

Manchester University was the popular name used for the Victoria University of Manchester, constituted in 1904. Manchester University emerged from the federal Victoria University, which included colleges in Liverpool and Leeds alongside Owens College in Manchester. In 1900 the colleges of the Victoria University separated and in 1904 Owens College was reconstituted as the Victoria University of Manchester, though it was often known simply known as Manchester University, or Owens. In 2004 Manchester University, under its formal name the Victoria University of Manchester, combined with the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) to become known as The University of Manchester.

Jodrell Bank Observatory is the location of one of the world’s largest fully steerable radio telescopes, which has a reflector that measures 76 metres (250 feet) in diameter. The telescope is located with other smaller radio telescopes at Jodrellbank (formerly Jodrell Bank), about 20 miles south of Manchester. Immediately after World War II the British astronomer Alfred Charles Bernard Lovell, working at the University of Manchester’s botanical site at Jodrell Bank with war-surplus radar equipment, began research in radio and radar astronomy. Construction of the telescope began in 1952. Operation began shortly before the launching, on, by the Soviet Union of the first artificial Earth satellite, Sputnik I, on 4 October 1957, and the satellite’s carrier rocket was tracked at Jodrell Bank by radar. Most of the operational time at Jodrell Bank is devoted to astronomy rather than to tracking and communication, but the telescope has been part of the tracking network for the United States program of space exploration and monitored most of the Soviet accomplishments. The Jodrell Bank telescope transmitted the first photographs from the surface of the Moon, received on 6 February 1966 by the Soviet Luna 9 probe. In 1987 the 76-metre telescope was renamed the Lovell Telescope. It and another telescope at Jodrell Bank are two elements of a seven-telescope array, the Multi-Element Radio Linked Interferometer Network (MERLIN), which uses microwave links to connect the individual telescopes into a radio interferometer 135 miles in diameter.