The first of the asteroid-hunting Pan-STARRS telescopes is now on the lookout for threatening near-Earth objects, but its vision is impaired due to the US military.
From its perch atop the Haleakala volcano in Maui, Hawaii, PS1’s mammoth, 1400-megapixel camera should uncover 100,000 new asteroids and identify any that are on a collision course with Earth. However, the US air force, which funded the development of the telescope, requires that software automatically black out a swathe of pixels to hide the trajectories of passing satellites.
Pan-STARRS (an acronym for Panoramic Survey Telescope And Rapid Response System) is a planned array of astronomical telescopes and cameras and computing facility that will survey the sky on a continual basis, including accurate astrometry and photometry of detected objects. By detecting any differences from previous observations of the same areas of the sky, it is expected to discover a very large number of new asteroids, comets, variable stars and other celestial objects. Its primary mission is to detect near-Earth objects that threaten to cause impact events. It is expected to create a database of all objects visible from Hawaii (three-quarters of the entire sky) down to apparent magnitude 24.
Pan-STARRS’ first telescope, called PS1, is located at the summit of Haleakala on Maui, Hawaii, and went online on December 6, 2008, under the administration of the University of Hawaii. PS1 began full time science observations on May 13, 2010, and the PS1 Science Mission is underway, with operations funded by The PS1 Science Consortium or PS1SC, a consortium including the Max Planck Society in Germany, National Central University in Taiwan, Edinburgh, Durham and Queen’s Belfast Universities in the UK, and Johns Hopkins and Harvard Universities in the United States and the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network.
The Pan-STARRS Project is a collaboration between the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Maui High Performance Computing Center and Science Applications International Corporation. Telescope construction is funded by the United States Air Force. Having completed PS1, the Pan-STARRS Project is now focusing on building PS2, and then the full array of four telescopes, sometimes called PS4. Completing the array of four telescopes is estimated at a total cost of US$100 million for the entire array.
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