His daytime radar observations of the Giacobinid meteor shower in 1946 proved the worth of the technique. From 1950 he studied radio emission from space, showing that its fluctuations were atmospheric effects akin to the scintillation of starlight. He supervised the building of the Mark I radio telescope at Jodrell Bank (now known as the Lovell Telescope), and attracted publicity by using it to monitor the first Soviet space probes. Lovell also studied radio emission from flare stars.