Bringing Credit to Jodrell Bank

The first word about the latest Russian space feat came, as usual, not from a Moscow spokesman but from a greying British scientist. Astronomer Sir Bernard Lovell, 52, who used the University of Manchester's 250-ft. radio telescope at Jodrell Bank, England, to track the Soviet spaceship Luna 10 on its successful moon mission, jumped at the chance of providing a maneuver-by-maneuver account that enabled the free world to learn of the first lunar or bit before most Russians did.

Noting that Luna's signals sounded like "a skirl of bagpipes," Lovell relayed them by loudspeaker to reporters gathered at the observatory and provided an interpretive narrative of the flight. As the signal frequency decreased, he explained that Luna was accelerating under the pull of lunar gravity. A sudden increase in frequency followed by fading of the signal led Lovell to believe that a retrorocket had been fired, slowing Luna down. He interpreted the erratic signals that were received afterward to mean that the spacecraft had successfully achieved a 300-to 400-mile-high lunar orbit, but that it was tumbling and not transmitting any television signals.

When the Russians finally broke their silence, they revealed that Luna 10 was in an orbit that took it around the moon once every two hours and 58 minutes. Though the Russians described several devices aboard the craft's 540-lb. instrument capsule, and reported that they were sending back useful information, they made no mention of a television camera, thus lending support to Lovell's conclusion that no pictures were being transmitted.

Aiding Pioneer. Lovell's latest space scoop came only two months after Jodrell Bank successfully intercepted television signals being transmitted from the moon's surface by Luna 9, reproduced them on a newspaper facsimile machine, and immediately released them--a full 24 hours in advance of the Russians (TIME, Feb. 4). Before that, he was first to announce that Luna 2 had hit the moon, and that earlier lunar soft-landing attempts by the Russians had ended in failure. He has also beaten the Russians to the punch in revealing some of the first details of their manned space flights. In addition, he has cooperated with the U.S. space program by using the Jodrell Bank telescope to obtain telemetry from the Pioneer and Mariner space probes, even to send the signal that fired the second stage on the Pioneer 5 deep-space probe.

It is partly by accident that Lovell was cast in the role of a space-age monitor. In the early days of the space race, the Jodrell Bank observatory had the best steerable radio telescope available outside Russia, in a location that permitted tracking Soviet satellites. As a result, Lovell established a reputation as the Western world's foremost interpreter of Soviet space exploits--a reputation that he has maintained by using the skillful public-relations techniques demonstrated at Jodrell Bank last week.

Convincing Demonstration. Lovell is motivated to monitor by his own intense interest in space flight and by a crusading desire to popularize astronomy. More than most other scientists, he has good reason to value public interest in his work. In 1957, while an inquiry was under way into the rising costs of the giant construction at Jodrell Bank, the new radio telescope became the first in the Western world to successfully track and pick up signals from Sputnik 1--a convincing demonstration that it was probably worth the more than $2,000,000 price after all. Later work in tracking U.S. satellites brought Jodrell Bank funds from NASA.

For all the publicity, though, less than 3% of Jodrell Bank's time is devoted to its headline-making monitoring. "We are not basically interested in tracking satellites and space probes," says Lovell. "It just so happens that this particular form of Russian and American space work fits into our normal research problems." The rest of Jodrell Bank's work is done on pure astronomical research --measuring the angular diameter of quasars and other radio sources, determining the hydrogen content of galaxies, pinpointing the location of radio sources by lunar occultation, mapping the Milky Way. Lovell's particular speciality is studying small flare stars that periodically increase in luminosity.

Castigating Russians. Inevitably, Lovell has become best known to the public for his tracking exploits, and he is usually called upon to comment on all significant missions and probes. He obviously enjoys his role of space expert and he has been outspokenly frank--handing out unreserved praise for both Russian and U.S. space achievements while bluntly criticizing what he considers misguided efforts. In 1962 he violently opposed the U.S. hydrogen-bomb explosion in space over the Pacific, and has spoken out against a communications experiment that placed a band of metallic needles in orbit. In both cases he was convinced that the shots endangered other scientific projects and observations. When a Soviet space probe actually hit Venus last month, he castigated the Russians with equal vigor. "This is a regrettable event which has annoyed me considerably," he said. "This landing may have seriously affected a future biological survey of the planet's surface."

Whenever possible, Lovell travels outside Britain to keep up to date on scientific progress in other nations and to promote cooperation among the world's scientists. After conferring with space experts during a 1963 visit to the Soviet Union, he brought back word that the Russians might well have abandoned the race for the moon. It was one of the few times that Lovell's considered judgment has been dead wrong.

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