The Pan-STARRS telescopes located in Haleakala in Hawaii are the world’s largest and most powerful digital cameras. Funded by NASA’s Near-Earth Object Observation Program it is currently employed to hunt and track potentially dangerous space objects.
Here we explore what Pan-STARRs are and check out some of its most impressive vital stats.
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What are the Pan-STARRS Telescopes?
The Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System, Pan-STARRS for short, is a system for wide-field astronomical imaging developed and operated by the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Hawaii. It is located at the Haleakala Observatory (a massive shield volcano on Maui) in Hawaii and consists of astronomical cameras, telescopes, and associated computing facilities.
The telescope’s purpose is to survey the night’s sky for moving or variable objects on a continual basis and to also gather accurate astrometric and photometric on already-detected objects.
“The complete Pan-STARRS system will use the world’s largest digital camera—with 1.4 gigapixels—to survey the entire sky visible from Hawaii roughly once a week. This vast survey is expected to discover thousands of supernovae, greatly increasing the number of data points on the Hubble diagram and therefore increasing the precision with which we know the expansion history of the universe and its acceleration rate.” – Learner.org.
It was built as part of a collaboration between the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Maui High-Performance Computing Center and Science Applications International Corporation. The telescope’s construction was funded by the United States Air Force.
“Pan-STARRS is a system for wide-field astronomical imaging developed and operated by the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii. Pan-STARRS1 (PS1) is the first part of Pan-STARRS to be completed and is the basis for both Data Releases 1 and 2 (DR1 and DR2).
The PS1 survey used a 1.8-meter telescope and its 1.4 Gigapixel camera (GPC1; see PS1 GPC1 camera) to image the sky in five broadband filters (g, r, i, z, y). The PS1 Science Consortium funded the operation of the Pan-STARRS1 telescope, situated at Haleakala Observatories near the summit of Haleakala in Hawaii, for the purposes of astronomical research.
The PS1 consortium is made up of astronomers and engineers from 14 institutions from six countries.” – Pan-STARRS.
PS1 went online in December of 2008 with full-time science observations being made from May of 2010. With this phase complete, their focus turned to the construction of a second telescope PS2.
The second telescope, Pan-STARRS2 (P2) was also been built using funding from NASA’s Near-Earth Object Observation Program. It is similar in design to PS1 with the exception that it has a slightly larger camera with 1.5 billion pixels.
What has Pan-STARRS detected?
The Pan-STARRS project is the world’s leading Near-Earth Object discovery telescope. Since opening for business, it has discovered over half of the larger Near-Earth Objects with diameters over 140 meters.
“Each night, PS1 observes about 1,000 square degrees of the night sky, using a sequence of four exposures that span a period of about an hour. The images are compared to each other, and objects that move during the one hour period are identified.
Objects that have unusual motions that make them likely to be Near-Earth Objects are immediately reported to the Minor Planet Center, and a worldwide network of telescopes obtains additional observations of these Near-Earth Object candidates to determine their orbits and sizes, and to determine whether any of them pose a threat to the Earth.
The positions and brightnesses of all other moving objects are also reported to the Minor Planet Center, usually within 12 hours of observation.” – Institute of Astronomy, Hawaii.
Apart from the massive amount of new data on existing known objects that the telescope has produced, the Pan-STARRS telescope has also made some new interesting discoveries. By detecting differences from previous observations of parts of the sky the telescope has been able to discover many new asteroids, comets, variable stars, supernovae, and other celestial objects.
For this reason, and others, one of its main objectives is to search for and track Near-Earth objects (NEO). The project is especially interested in those NEO’s that could potentially lead to impact events on Earth.
Pan-STARRS is, therefore, is used to create a database of all objects visible from Hawaii which covers around three-quarters fo the entire sky.
One of the Pan-STARRS’s most significant discoveries was the detection of the mysterious interstellar object 1I/2017 U1 (aka. ‘Oumuamua). After this announcement, months of follow-up observations were made to learn more about this interstellar visitor as well as resolve the dispute as to whether it was a comet or an asteroid.
PS2 was credited in 2018 by the Minor Planet Center with the discovery of the potentially hazardous Apollo asteroids. This was the first minor-planet discover made by the facility in 2015.
7 takeaway facts about the Pan-STARRS Telescope
1. Pan-STARRS1 and 2 are the world’s leading Near-Earth Object detection telescopes. The constructed telescopes are some of the world’s largest-ever digital cameras with billions of pixels apiece.
2. Pan-STARRS1 (PS1) was the first to be built and consists of a 1.8-meter diameter telescope. It is located near the summit of Haleakala on the island of Maui. Pan-STARRS2 (PS2) was built adjacent to PS1 and has a slightly larger 1.5 billion pixel camera.
3. Pan-STARRS1 and 2 have made some significant discoveries since their inception including the now infamous ‘Oumuamua asteroid.
4. Pan-STARRS is expected to detect and discover hundreds of thousands of asteroids and other space objects within our Solar System. This includes things like Jupiter trojans, Kuiper belt objects and other asteroids around Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
5. The project is also expected to discover many other objects outside of our Solar System. This will include things like variable stars, supernovae and, hopefully, help discover whether dwarf galaxies actually exist.
6. The lion’s share of its funding comes from the NASA Near-Earth Object Observations program. For this reason, most of its time is devoted to the hunt for these, and similar, objects.
7. The project’s second data release, Pan-STARRS DR2 was released earlier this year and is the largest astronomical data ever released. It was over 1.6 petabytes of images which is equivalent to around 30,000 times the amount of content on large sites like Wikipedia.
