Jan 13 1976
From The Space Library
Eighty percent of the 114 federal research laboratories had not adopted cost-cutting activities recommended 6 yr ago by the General Accounting Office. A new GAO survey found that agencies had not made periodic inspections of equipment to find unused items that could be sold; had not established equipment pools to eliminate duplication and underuse of costly scientific tools; and had not started using "time meters" as a check on bow often the equipment was used. Agencies following the three recommendations could save millions of dollars, said Rep. Les Aspin (D-Wis.) in releasing the GAO report, citing an atomic research facility that saved $24.2 million by disposing of unneeded equipment. Aspin also referred to purchases of expensive sophisticated equipment for a single experiment that was never used again, when it could have been sold or passed along to another agency. (W Star, 13 Jan 76, C8)
The largest optical telescope in the Southern Hemisphere began operation on a mountaintop about 483 km north of Santiago, Chile, to give astronomers their best look at objects such as the Magellanic Clouds and the brightest globular star clusters visible only from that hemisphere. The 13.7m-long telescope's steerable portion weighed 300 tons, so delicately balanced that one person could move it by hand. Its mirrors were made of Cervit, an optical material insensitive to temperature changes; its 15 -ton main mirror was 4 m in diam. and 61 cm thick, and the secondary mirror was 1.3 m in diameter. The new Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory would be run by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), Inc., under contract to the National Science Foundation and in cooperation with the Univ. of Chile at Santiago; Cerro Tololo and its sister institution, Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Ariz., would be national research centers with 60% of all telescope time available to qualified visiting scientists who would otherwise lack access to instruments capable of frontier research in astronomy. (NSF Release PR 76-4)
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