Abstract.The Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) at the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy is a funded project to repeatedly survey the entire visible sky to faint limiting magnitudes (mR ∼ 24). It will be composed of four 1.8m diameter apertures each outfitted with fast readout orthogonal transfer Giga-pixel CCD cameras. A single aperture prototype telescopes is achieved first-light in the second half of 2006 with the full system becoming available a few years later. Roughly 60% of the surveying will be suitable for discovery of new solar system objects and it will cover the ecliptic, opposition and low solarelongation regions. In a single lunation Pan-STARRS will detect about five times more solar system objects than the entire currently known sample. Within its first year Pan-STARRS will have detected 20,000 Kuiper Belt Objects and by the end of its ten year operational lifetime we expect to have found 10 7 Main Belt objects and achieve ∼90% observational completeness for all NEOs larger than ∼300m diameter. With these data in hand Pan-STARRS will revolutionize our knowledge of the contents and dynamical structure of the solar system.Keywords. Keyword1, keyword2, keyword3, etc.
Pan-STARRS OverviewThe conceptual design of the Pan-STARRS system derives from a desire to survey the sky as deeply, rapidly and inexpensively as possible. Relatively simple technological and economic arguments suggest that the minimum cost for a surveying system is achieved with telescope mirrors in the range of 1.5m to 2.5m diameter. Simply put, it is more cost effective to build more small telescopes to reach the same effective limiting magnitude and sky-coverage as a massive system due to the fact that duplicating a small system increases costs linearly while the cost of a single large system increases as a power of its light gathering ability. Another major benefit of a distributed aperture system is the reduced time to deployment over a monolithic system with equivalent etendue. Thus, Pan-STARRS opted to develop a design for a coordinated set of four small telescopes with the capability of a large synoptic survey system.A prototype single Pan-STARRS telescope (PS1) on Haleakala is nearing completion and is expected to start survey operations in mid to late 2007. It is designed to act as a test-bed for the commissioning, testing, and calibration of the Pan-STARRS hardware and software in anticipation of the full (four aperture) Pan-STARRS array. PS1 uses a 1.8m primary mirror to image a roughly 7 square degree field on a 1.4 Gigapixel CCD camera. With 0.26 arcsecond pixels, the images from PS1 will be well-matched to the sub-arcsecond seeing of Haleakala. The large entendue of PS1 will make it the most † for the Pan-STARRS team.