* Astronomy

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Pan-STARRS1 Survey

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RE: Pan-STARRS

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Title: PS2: Managing the next step in the Pan-STARRS wide field survey system
Authors: William S. Burgett

The Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) is unique among the existing or planned major ground-based optical survey systems as the only "distributed aperture" system. The concept of increasing system etendue by replicating small telescopes and digital cameras presents both management opportunities and challenges. The focus in this paper is on management lessons learned from PS1, and how those have been used to form the management plan for PS2. The management plan components emphasised here include technical development, financial and schedule planning, and critical path and risk management. Finally, the status and schedule for PS2 are presented.

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Pan-STARRS PS1 and PS2 Telescopes

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Pan-STARRS PS1 telescope

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RE: Pan-STARRS

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UH's telescope plans for Mauna Kea delayed

The University of Hawaii said Wednesday it expects to delay by about two years the start of a new asteroid-hunting telescope it plans to build at Mauna Kea's summit.
University of Hawaii astronomer and Pan-STARRS principal investigator Nick Kaiser said mechanical problems pushed back completion of a prototype built at Haleakala. This then caused a broader plan to install four of these telescopes together at Mauna Kea to be postponed.
The snag also caused the institute to use more funds during the initial stage of the project than expected.
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Last month, it was announced that the first Pan-STARRS (Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System) telescope, PS1, is fully operational. The system is designed to search for "killer" asteroids and comets by mapping large portions of the sky each night to look for moving objects in our solar system. Based in Hawaii, Pan-STARRS features the world's largest digital camera - a 1,400-megapixel device designed by researchers at MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
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Asteroid hunters part-blinded by the military

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.
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The Pan-STARRS 1 telescope, a joint project of NASA, the Air Force and a consortium of universities, began operating this spring. Its primary purpose is to map moving objects in space, particularly those with a potential to collide with earth.
NASA has long had a program to identify Near Earth Objects, particularly large ones that might create great damage if they collided with Earth. These are known as Potentially Hazardous Objects (PHOs).
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