Pan-STARRS1: Operations; Public Data Release; Education and Outreach

University Of Hawaii, Honolulu

Investigators

Abstract

AST-1238877 The Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) is an innovative wide-field imaging facility developed at the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy (IfA). The first telescope, Pan-STARRS1 or PS1, began full operations in May of 2010. Operating the PS1 System includes managing the observatory, the telescope and its camera, an image processing pipeline, a relational database, and servers for the reduced science products. The PS1 Surveys include five specific studies covering a wide range of astronomical problems: 1) a ~30,000 square degree survey of the entire sky north of declination -30 degrees, 2) a medium deep survey of some 70 square degrees in well-studied fields at high galactic latitude, 3) a solar system ecliptic plane survey optimized for the discovery of Near Earth Objects and Kuiper Belt Objects, 4) a stellar transit survey towards the Galactic bulge, and 5) a deep survey of the Andromeda galaxy (M31) to detect microlensing events. The PS1 Surveys will extend the scientific impact of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) with better image quality, depth, and area coverage, and will open up time-domain astronomy to enable the discovery of transient and variable phenomena. In order to make the PS1 data public and accessible as soon as possible and thus fully to exploit their scientific potential, the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) will create and support an archive of the PS1 data products that can serve the entire astronomical community. This award supports three primary activities for the PS1 project: 1) finish the last four months of PS1 operations and complete the survey; 2) re-reduce the entire PS1 data set with a final astrometric reference catalog and the best ("uber") photometric calibration; and 3) enable a PS1 archive at STScI capable of serving the calibrated image data as well as a database of all detections and ~30 billion astronomical objects. The impact of making the PS1 data products available to the astronomical and outreach communities cannot be overstated. The photometric data alone will provide a high quality standard reference within the field of view of any astronomical imaging program on any telescope observing within the PS1 survey region. The impact of SDSS has been enormous: PS1 can confidently be expected to be even more significant, due to its better spatial resolution and depth, wider and deeper components, and access to the time domain.