The primary function of the 64-m telescope, situated at Tidbinbilla near Canberra, is to communicate with and to control NASA’s unmanned interplanetary space craft (Reid et al. 1973). Similar telescopes are situated at Goldstone in California and in Madrid and are part of the NASA-JPL Deep Space Network (DSN). Under the Host Country Radio Science Agreement between the U.S. and Australia the telescope is available to Australian astronomers at times outside those committed to normal tracking. A radiometer operating at λ = 13.5 mm has been built by CSIRO for use on the 64-m telescope. It was initially used for VLBI observations of water vapour masers on baselines between the U.S., Australia and USSR (Batchelor et al. 1976).

The causes of various traits of the polar motion are still unknown or uncertain. For exploring these the Chandler nutation has the advantage of being readily observable and it should be independent of external torques. This nutation shows a prograde motion of the earth’s axes of rotation and of excitation about each other. For simplicity the positions of the poles of rotation P and excitation ψ (Munk & MacDonald, 1960) are given in terms of dimensionless excitation functions which apply in principle whether they come from distributions of mass, relative motions or torques. Let O be the pole of zero excitation and R be the angular distance between P and ψ.

A time scale may be defined as a system for dating events. A clock is a device for interpolating between observations of the time scale. From antiquity, time scales have been based on the earth’s rotation; even today, the atomic-based time scale Universal Coordinated Time (UTC) is adjusted annually, or when necessary, to keep it in time with the rotating earth. However, the continual search for greater accuracy in time keeping has led to the adoption of time scales based on other phenomena, so that there are now four classes of time scales in use, as summarised in Table I.

It has been recently suggested (Crawford 1979) that there is an interaction between a photon and curved space-time that can be observed as a redshift of the photon frequency. Since the amount of the redshift is a function of the curvature it may be used to discriminate between gravitational theories. This is easily done using the parametrized post-Newtonian (PPN) limit fully described in the review article by Will (1972).

When the separation between two stars becomes sufficiently small, tidal forces may cause one or both stars to disrupt. Roche (1850) studied the problem of the stability of a liquid in synchronous, circular orbit with a point mass, and predicted an instability of the liquid star for separations ≤ 2.5 r S⅓ where R is the initial radius of the liquid star, and S is the ratio of the mass of the point to the mass of the liquid star. Darwin generalized the problem to allow for two liquid stars in circular orbit. The whole of the classical research has been systematically analysed by Chandrasekhar (1969) using the tensor virial method. An error in Chandrasekhar’s analysis was corrected by Tassoul (1975).