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.