---
title: 'Can a 70-year-old telescope still be useful?'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=YrZyJuaBfKA'
video_id: 'YrZyJuaBfKA'
date: 2026-06-15
duration_sec: 1390
---

# Can a 70-year-old telescope still be useful?

> Source: [Can a 70-year-old telescope still be useful?](https://youtube.com/watch?v=YrZyJuaBfKA)

## Summary

Tom Scott visits Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire, home of the 70-year-old Lovell Telescope, to answer whether this historic radio telescope is still scientifically useful. He explores the site, meets researchers, and climbs the iconic dish, discovering that ongoing upgrades keep it at the forefront of astronomy.

### Key Points

- **Childhood visit to Jodrell Bank** [00:49] — Tom recalls visiting Jodrell Bank as a ten-year-old, disappointed he couldn't get close to the telescope.
- **SKAO headquarters** [02:26] — The Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO) has its headquarters at Jodrell Bank, an intergovernmental project building the world's largest radio telescopes in Australia and South Africa.
- **SKAO's mission** [03:02] — William, director of communication, explains SKAO aims to observe the cosmic dawn and make Nobel Prize-worthy discoveries.
- **Unknowns in astronomy** [04:06] — Head of science operations notes we don't know our own galaxy's shape, how stars form, or how planets grow from dust to full size.
- **Lovell Telescope control room** [05:54] — Simon, associate director, shows the original 1957 control desk with modern electronics, and the telescope remains the third largest fully steerable in the world.
- **E-MERLIN network** [08:00] — The Lovell Telescope connects to the E-MERLIN network of dishes across the UK, allowing remote control and correlation of signals.
- **Correlator supercomputer** [10:00] — A supercomputer correlates signals from multiple telescopes, combining them to achieve resolution equivalent to a telescope the size of the network.
- **Pulsar research** [11:00] — Benjamin shows a live feed from a 42-foot telescope tracking a pulsar—a rotating neutron star used as a cosmic clock to test general relativity.
- **Asteroid radar** [12:14] — Phoebe explains using radar from Madrid and the Lovell Telescope network to bounce signals off asteroids, achieving metre-scale resolution.
- **Telescope mechanics** [16:00] — The 3,000-tonne telescope moves on 64 railway wheels, can be jacked up with hydraulics, and tracks with precision to a thousandth of a degree.
- **Climbing the dish** [18:10] — Tom climbs onto the dish surface and up to the focal point, noting the parabola focuses radio waves to a detector at the top.
- **Lovell still doing science** [21:04] — Despite being 70 years old and Grade I listed, the telescope's surface is 25 years old and its detectors are modern, keeping it scientifically active.
- **Operating the telescope** [21:51] — Tom sounds the siren and initiates a move, fulfilling a childhood dream as the telescope turns to its first science target.

### Conclusion

The Lovell Telescope remains a vital scientific instrument thanks to continuous upgrades, proving that a well-maintained parabolic dish never goes out of date.

## Transcript

There’s a bit of tension in the story
for this video.
When I put out a call for interesting
things that I could film in England,
one of the team from Jodrell Bank
got in touch.
Tucked away in the Cheshire countryside,
it’s the home of the Lovell Telescope,
a World Heritage Site,
the largest radio telescope
in the country,
and one of the scientific and engineering
icons of Britain.
And the tension is this.
They wanted to show off the new science
they’re working on
all across their campus,
and we are going to do that,
’cos one of the big questions I had was,
is a 70-year-old telescope still useful?
But also, from my side,
what I wanted very much
was to climb the giant telescope.
(bird twitters)
Well, there are definitely worse views
than that to start the day, aren’t there?
There is a reason for that,
beyond my just being a massive nerd,
when I was young,
probably about ten years old,
I went to Jodrell Bank as a visitor,
to see what was then called
the Discovery Centre,
not on a school trip.
Young me,
very much into space and science,
wanted to go see the big telescope.
But of course, they don’t let visitors
onto, or even up close to the telescope,
it’s a working science thing.
And while I had a good day out,
I think I was a bit disappointed
that I couldn’t get under it or...
up on it.
There’s no photos of that trip,
by the way, it was the nineties,
people didn’t carry cameras around
every minute of their lives.
Anyway, about 30 years later, I went back.
Adult-me parked up, checked in with the team
at Jodrell Bank, and first up,
they took me to see
the newly-updated visitor centre.
There’s a lot of screens and displays,
it’s far more impressive
than it used to be,
but I was quite glad to see there were
still a couple of things I remembered.
Do you still have the black hole table?
’Cos I remember...
 -If you just go round here...
You still have the black hole table!
I spent like 15 minutes as a kid
just playing with that black hole table.
I was really tempted to do that again,
but never mind.
Also, the old acoustic dishes
are still there!
What you’re about to hear is the audio
from the on-camera mics, by the way,
no trickery.
I have such a strong memory of these
from when I was like ten years old.
(sotto voce)
You can whisper very quietly...
And it turns up on the other side.
Core memory. Got to do that again
30 years later.
It’s not bad.
I couldn’t find the mock control room
where kids used to be able to sit down and
pretend they were controlling the dish,
but still, happy with that.
Nostalgia complete, on to the science.
Now, there are two sides behind the scenes
at Jodrell Bank these days.
I did remember seeing the old university
buildings from the ’60s and ’70s,
but in the last few years, there’s been
a very shiny new headquarters built
next door for another project.
The Square Kilometre Array Observatory,
the SKAO,
is a big intergovernmental organisation.
The actual telescopes
are on the other side of the planet,
in South Africa and Australia,
but the headquarters is at Jodrell Bank.
I met William, who’s their director
of communication, outreach and education,
and the first thing we went to
seemed almost out of place.
That’s a very sci-fi sign, isn’t it?
You’ve picked
a full science fiction font there.
Okay, you have a proper council chamber!
Well, so, that’s, you know,
right there in the middle of Cheshire.
That’s quite unusual. 
-Yeah.
It’s an unusual setting.
Big picture, what is the SKAO?
So, maybe, you know, you should turn
around, and this is the SKAO here.
You know, all these flags. 
-(laughs)
Oh, I can see why you’re head of outreach.
That was smooth.
But this really embodies who we are
as an international organisation.
What we are doing is really to build
and to operate
the world’s largest radio telescopes.
And one will be observing
lower frequencies,
so that’s the one in Australia.
That’s the one we will be using
to really go back in time
to what we call the cosmic dawn.
The Cosmic Dawn, as in D-A-W-N,
is the period just after the Big Bang.
And by “just after”,
I mean a quarter of a billion years,
because the numbers you encounter
in astronomy are mind-boggling.
So, really observing, you know,
these very first signals
which were emitted after the Big Bang.
And so, that will give us some clues
about, you know, how all of it started.
We know that Nobel Prize discoveries
will be made with our telescopes.
When? I don’t know, but, you know,
that’s the goal.
I got to talk to their
head of science operations.
One of the cool things about the SKA
is really that we’re building it
to be as flexible as possible to observe
things that we don’t even know about yet.
We don’t know what our galaxy
really looks like.
I mean, it’s quite bizarre to think about
the fact that...
Do we not know that?
With all of the beautiful images
of other galaxies out there,
we don’t really know
what our own galaxy looks like
because it’s quite hard to observe.
-Yeah, you don’t have a mirror out there!
 -Exactly.
We don’t actually know how big stars form,
and when you’re talking about
understanding galaxies
throughout the universe,
I mean, if you don’t understand how those
building blocks are really being formed,
then how can you really know the detail
of what’s going on in the galaxies?
I mean, how planets form. 
-Yeah.
I mean, we know that they form
in the debris disc around stars.
But we actually don’t know the crucial
phase of how things get from
really, really small particles
through the centimetre scale
up to something that’s much larger,
of course, to make a planet.
We just assume it happens.
It must happen.
-Yes. 
-We just don’t know how.
We know it happens, but our theory
currently doesn’t support it.
And the SKA is really well-suited
to that scale.
A lot of things that I assumed
were pretty much proven and sorted
are still promising theories
with data attached.
The SKAO is going to produce about
a petabyte of science data every day
to help with a lot of astronomy.
But while that’s all coordinated
at Jodrell Bank,
the actual receipt of signals
is happening in other countries.
Because one of the problems
with any radio telescope in the UK
is there isn’t much room
for radio quiet zones.
And certainly not this close to cities.
Jodrell Bank does ask visitors
to turn their phones off,
but there are still roads and train lines
nearby, there will be interference.
So I still have the question...
is the Lovell Telescope,
the famous one, still useful?
Or is it now more history than science?
To start answering that, I got taken
into the telescope control room by Simon,
he’s a professor and the associate
director of the observatory.
Five years to build?
Very rapid project, enormously ambitious
in the early 1950s,
not long after the war,
to build a radio telescope
which was so much larger
than anything that existed before.
How much?
So, it was ten times larger than
the largest telescope that existed before.
Oh, okay. Right, sure.
And a leap in the dark.
They had no idea what they would discover.
There were big telescopes before
what became known
as the Mark One 250-Foot Telescope,
they just weren’t steerable.
To this day, the big dish at Jodrell Bank
is still the third largest
fully steerable telescope in the world.
It can be pointed at anywhere in the sky.
I cannot tell you how much
the young version of me
that sat at the mock control room
that the discovery centre had back then
is absolutely overjoyed.
Oh, my word.
(laughs)
So, that is the telescope.
That’s the 250-foot,
76-metre Lovell Telescope.
Pointing straight up,
’cos we’re doing some painting
and repair work on it at the moment.
I keep worrying that I’m getting
in the way of science here.
And I’ve just realised
that this is not an observing day.
There is literally a cherry picker with
someone painting the telescope in there.
Alright, so, can I have a look?
What’s it...?
So, this is Mirza, our controller today.
So, there’s somebody in here,
there’s a controller in this room
24 hours a day...
Right. It’s a lovely control desk, this.
I know that’s the nerdiest thing
I’ve said in a while.
It’s a really nice control desk.
 -This is the original 1957 control desk.
-Right.
 -In terms of the steel.
But all the electronics
that drives the telescope
and controls the telescope
so precisely is new.
I am a little worried that,
because the folks in that room
were explaining the very basics
of their radio astronomy work to me,
I’m doing them
a little bit of a disservice.
So, just to be clear, everyone
you’re hearing from in that control room
has a PhD.
Anyway, Mirza, the telescope controller,
also showed me a more modern-looking
bank of screens at the back of the room,
that connects the telescope
to the E-MERLIN network,
a collection of smaller dishes
across the UK.
So, you can remote control
all of those as well?
We can remotely control
from this station here.
As you can see, we have the names
of all the telescopes.
You’ll see they’re pointing
at the same position,
so they’re all on the same source.
That’s not an icon....
that’s not a static icon.
That’s literally the direction
it’s pointing.
That’s live.
That’s live data coming through.
You’ll see the Lovell is... 
-Lovell is pointed up, and it’s red?
It’s pointed straight up, and it’s red.
It’s pointing up,
but not in a few hours’ time, hopefully.
Right.
So, you’re observing something right now.
I’m not sure what it is, but you’re
definitely observing something.
That something was explained to me
by Emmanuel.
Again PhD.
We are pointing
on this particular target, 3C84,
which is one of the brightest
radio sources in the sky.
And we use this source as a calibrator
to calibrate the instrument
or the observation when it is done.
So, once it stays on this target
for some time in the sky,
all the telescopes will move
to the science target
from the calibrator to the target
and then observe.
And then once the data comes through
the fibre-optics
from all the network of telescopes,
it is correlated right here
in Jodrell Bank.
And someone’s going to earn
their PhD off that,
or someone’s going to find
some magical discovery.
-You never know. 
-You never know.
One of the advantages of radio astronomy
is that scientists can take signals
from telescopes that are a long way apart,
correlate them all together
with fibre-optic cables and computers,
and end up with the equivalent resolution
of a telescope the size
of that entire network.
This is the ends of those optical fibres.
So, these optical fibres stretch out
to the individual telescopes,
and then we have to focus them,
and we do that in the machine
which is behind us.
Oh, there’s a...
(laughs)
Okay, you’ve got...
Oh! Okay.
Yep.
(whirring)
Little bit noisy.
So, this is the supercomputer
which is doing the focusing.
It’s a correlator designed to multiply
the raw signals
from each pair of telescopes,
accumulate those,
and then Emmanuel and colleagues
turn those into images.
And the reason it’s in this
rather weird room
is that this keeps any
of the radio signals that this generates
away from the big dish.
So now we can go and see some of our young
scientists working on the data.
The young scientists in question
all either have their PhDs
or are working on them.
Sorry to interrupt.
I’ve been told you’ve all been briefed on
who I am and what I’m doing here.
I’m worried that Simon just kind of opened
the door and said, “Hi, here’s Tom.”
Benjamin is working on a live feed
from the 42-foot telescope,
one of the other smaller dishes
at Jodrell Bank,
which is picking up the signal
from the rapidly rotating remnants
of a collapsed star, called a pulsar.
I have an animation
of what one of those looks like here...
Someone has prepared a presentation here!
Simon’s been doing hard work here.
Thank you, folks.
So what we’re seeing here is a beam
of radio emission,
a little bit like a lighthouse
that is sweeping itself around the sky,
and the reason it sweeps around
the sky like this is,
I actually have a little model here.
You have a model!
I knew you were coming.
As the star rotates, that beam,
that radio beam, like here
that’s coming away from the magnetic pole,
is sweeping around the sky
somewhat like a lighthouse.
And if we happen to be
fortuitously located in the galaxy,
and that beam sweeps across Earth,
we will see a little pulse
every time it does so,
and so we call them pulsars.
A pulsar is the size of a city,
the mass of the Sun,
and the fastest one we know of
rotates 716 times per second.
Like I said, astronomy includes
mind-boggling numbers.
The idea really
is to unambiguously account
for every single rotation of these stars.
Right.
Because if we can do that,
then we can do all kinds of experiments
because what we have
is effectively clocks in the sky,
and if you have clocks in the sky,
that’s a fantastic way
to test general relativity
to find the limits of Einstein’s theory.
Next up is Phoebe, who was bouncing
radio signals off asteroids.
So, there’s a radar in Madrid
that’ll be transmitting,
and then all the radio telescopes
in this network
will then be listening to the echo
of that radar pulse,
like, bouncing off the asteroid. 
-Wow.
And you do that a few times,
and you can work out how fast it’s moving,
what direction it’s going,
everything like that, or...?
-Hopefully, with just one observation. 
-Just one?
With the multiple telescopes
at the same time,
you should get an idea of the speed
from that as well.
Resolution is much better than optical.
We can get down to about a metre,
sort of, with the imaging
that we’re going to do.
Hopefully.
This is, sort of, quite new,
and we’ve not tried it before.
This is the first VLBI observation
to get this level of detail.
VLBI there
is Very Long Baseline Interferometry,
which is the name for that process
of combining multiple telescopes
in different locations.
I mean, do I just ask
what everyone’s working on?
Like, I’m assuming Simon has prepared
all of you with something, but...
Uh, no. This is my regular office.
Okay!
 (all laugh)
Thank you!
That was a little unfair to Justin,
who I later found out specialises
in researching cosmic rays
and high-energy particles,
and was actively working there.
I’m sorry, Justin.
But all this research is based on data
coming in from other dishes.
We still haven’t talked
about the Lovell Telescope itself.
My question remains...
can a 70-year-old telescope
still be useful?
Or is it just a heritage landmark now?
Because it has a huge amount of heritage.
Perhaps most famously,
it intercepted photos
that were transmitted from the first
Soviet lander on the moon.
Those pictures were in the British press
well before the Soviets
ever wanted them released.
[announcer] The Western World had their
 first word of the successful probe
from an English source.
The Jodrell Bank Observatory
near Manchester.
It was now time to head out
to the telescope itself,
while the maintenance teams
were also out there,
and I wasn’t disrupting science.
I put on a climbing harness...
(harness clips and zips) 
Yeah, alright.
...and then went out to the dish,
accompanied by Simon,
plus telescope supervisor, Phil,
who’s worked on the site for decades,
and also, hastily-recruited
and quite excited, Megan,
one of Jodrell Bank’s comms team,
who was very happy
to volunteer to hold another camera.
Lead the way! Thank you very much.
Oh shades.
Definitely going to need them.
I’ve never encountered
safety sunglasses before,
but when you’ve got not only the sky,
but also the sky reflected off the bowl
of a bright-white telescope,
they’re a good idea.
I thought razor burn was just
a part of life
that I had to deal with.
But recently, I have unlearned
a bad habit
and it’s got better.
I used to instinctively
push down when I shaved.
Most folks who shave do that
without even thinking about it,
because most modern cartridge razors
are built with pivots or springs.
Or if you use disposables,
like I did,
the whole thing just
flexes a tiny amount.
Because the blade can move,
it feels a little unstable
when you're shaving and it meets
the resistance of your hair.
It tugs. So you push
just a little harder
to try and stabilise it
against your skin.
That doesn't actually stop
the blade flexing.
It just increases friction, and that’s
one of the causes of razor burn.
Just bad design.
A few weeks ago, Henson Shaving
sent me their razor.
It’s machined out of solid
aerospace-grade aluminum,
the tolerances are as tight
as 13 microns in places,
the blade is held completely rigid.
Which means I had to learn not to
apply so much force, and
let the weight of the razor
do most of the work.
And now I have less razor burn!
There’s no subscription model
 or proprietary blades here:
this takes the inexpensive, international-
 standard, double-edge blades.
If you want to use a different
brand of blade, you can,
so it also works out
much cheaper long-term.
If you use the link in the description
or scan the QR code on screen,
you too can get a Henson razor,
 hopefully end up with less razor burn,
plus they’ll throw in
a hundred free blades,
which should last you a long time.
It’s still impressive.
It really is.
3,000 tonnes, able to move from one part
of the sky to another fairly quickly,
but also able to track things
across the sky
to within a thousandth of a degree.
And that’s a challenge now.
It was a challenge in 1957... 
-Right!
...before computers! 
-(laughs)
I came here as a kid,
and remember looking up at this
when I was about this tall,
and wanting to do this.
Where do we go from here?
-We’ll head up towards the lift. 
-Alright.
We just take care stepping over the rails,
you can see they’re quite oily and greasy.
Oh okay.
And we don’t want greasy boots
to go climbing with.
Oh! Yeah.
So, are these railway tracks?
Yep, standard railway tracks.
Huh!
That makes sense, because it was built,
what, 70 years ago?
And you use the technology you have,
if it works and it’s proven.
It’s about 50-100 tonnes per wheel,
is the load.
-Yep.
 -64 wheels it runs on.
-(exhales)
 -So...
-How on earth?
 -When you change the wheels,
you jack the telescope up.
Yep.
-Really?
 -Yep.
So yep...
Just a hydraulic jack.
-Wow.
 -About 200 tonnes to lift it up.
Slide it out and put another one in.
The telescope is named
after Sir Bernard Lovell,
first director of the observatory,
the driving force
behind building the telescope.
And the painting job
is apparently never-ending.
You can see the blue cherry picker
in the background there.
It’s a steel structure,
it relies on painting to protect it.
And, you know, it’s been operating
for nearly 70 years,
and we want to keep it going
for another 70 years.
Bit cosy, but it does take four people.
(laughter)
And as we headed out onto the catwalks,
I was a little bit lost for words.
(laughs)
Oh wow!
-You okay? 
 -Yeah!
This is very, very cool.
We didn’t check that you’re okay with
heights before coming up here, did we?
(laughs)
Megan was absolutely fine with heights.
Also, you can see two of the other,
smaller Jodrell Bank dishes there,
those were the ones actively listening
and doing science at that moment.
From there, it was up
onto the first surface of the dish.
The telescope does look a bit different
compared to the early days.
It’s been shored up
and upgraded over years,
and it gained a brand new surface
in the early 2000s.
Oh!
The first stop
was between those two surfaces,
and then it was up onto the dish.
(laughing)
Thank you!
The telescope’s been standing
for 70 years,
this floor has been standing for 25 years,
and it’s made of steel, and yet,
somehow I’m still just
a little bit worried as I go up here.
So, the idea of the parabola is to focus
the radio waves that land on the telescope
to the focus, which is what you can see
at the top.
Yes, because there’s all sorts
of bad graphics
where the beam
is coming into that directly,
and it’s not, it comes into this bowl...
-Yes. 
-...and gets bounced up to there.
Yep.
And the property of a parabola is,
wherever it hits this surface,
it ends up in that hole in the middle.
And moreover, the path length
from each ray is the same.
So, if you like, all those radio waves
add up coherently, in step, at the focus.
-Oh!
 -That is the property of a parabola.
Right.
Radio has a wavelength anywhere
from a few centimetres to kilometres,
so thankfully, the dish surface
doesn’t have to be too precise.
We’re not going to cause any damage
walking on it.
To see nothing but dish
and the sky is magic.
Okay, if you’re ready
for the next challenge,
we can have a go at heading up
to the top and have a look.
Yeah, this is where I leave
you two behind.
Let’s do it.
And the sun’s come out!
And it’s blinding!
You were right about those shades.
I’m going to put those on.
I know, I look like a dork...
Oh, my word!
...and you can’t see my eyes.
I take the shades off again in a bit,
but with the sun out and that light
being reflected up towards us,
it was bright.
There is a reason that you do not point
a telescope at the sun.
Even well off-axis, like it was,
it felt so bright.
But we were high enough
that I could see the horizon again.
I am so incredibly lucky. Right.
Where do I go from here?
Climbing harness hooked in,
up the ladder to the focal point.
That is the very top of the telescope.
(laughs)
Oh, it wobbles!
Course it does.
What an incredible view.
Something special, isn’t it, up here?
It really is.
So, is it still doing science?
I don’t know what I was expecting.
Some mirror system,
some fancy little thing?
No, you’re literally moving
the entire detector.
Yep. Because there’s only one focal point
to the whole dish.
So, to use that same focal point twice... 
-Yeah.
...it requires to move one out of the way
and put the other one into the same slot.
The telescope is 70 years old.
It’s now a Grade I listed historical site,
which is probably going to give them
all sorts of trouble
refitting it in future.
But the surface is only 25 years old,
and those multiple detectors,
the different science packages
that can be moved into the focal point
are much more recent than that.
The Lovell Telescope
is still doing world-class science,
on its own, as part of networks,
because it turns out
that as long as you do the upkeep,
the scientific concept of
“massive parabolic dish
that you can point anywhere”
doesn’t really go out of date.
But there is one more thing.
I spent a while admiring the view,
and then headed back down,
and back in the control room,
I got to do something
that my ten-year-old self,
playing at the controls in the mock
control room in the discovery centre,
would never have dreamed was possible.
Alright.
Five seconds on the siren?
Five seconds on the siren, yes.
(siren wails)
(siren fades)
That got their attention, right?
And then...
Return.
-Enter on here.
 -Yeah.
With slow grace,
the Lovell Telescope began to turn
and pointed at its first science target
for the day.
There’s a kid, um, on the fence there,
he’s going to be, like,
a few pixels in the final footage.
And he’s just staring up at the machine,
and he’s about the age
I would have been when I got here.
I wonder if the same thing’s
just sparked off in his head?
(chuckles)
The ten-year-old version of me
is so happy.
Your dream’s come true.
Next time, or right now
on Nebula,
I visit a school
where the students have four legs
and a bendy backbone,
to see how they outperform robots.