Kenneth Chambers (Institute of Astronomy, University of Hawaii)
Keywords: Astronomy
Abstract:
Pan-STARRS1 began the PS1 Science Mission May 13, 2010. Operations of the PS1 System include the Observatory, Telescope, 1.4 Gigapixel Camera, Image Processing Pipeline , PSPS relational database and reduced science product software servers. The PS1 Surveys include: (1) A 3pi Steradian Survey; which currently has obtained more than 30 epochs in 5 passbands (grizy) of the entire sky north of Dec = -30, or 30,000 square degrees with 0.26 arcsecond pixels, or nearly 2 Petabytes of images; (2) A Medium Deep survey of 10 PS1 footprints spaced around the sky or a total of 70 square degrees; (3) A solar system ecliptic plane survey optimized for the discovery of Near Earth Objects and Kuiper Belt Objects, (4) a Stellar Transit Survey of ~50 square degrees in the galactic buldge; and (5) a Deep Survey of M31 with special attention to a proper cadence for microlensing. The performance of the PS1 system, sky coverage, cadence, and data quality of the images, the photometric calibration, and astrometric precision will be presented. Early science ranging from the solar system, brown dwarfs, galactic structure, supernovae, and galaxy counts will be presented. The PS1 Science Consortium consists of The Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawai’i in Manoa, the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg, the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, The Johns Hopkins University, the University of Durham, the University of Edinburgh, the Queen’s University Belfast, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Los Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network Incorporated, the National Central University of Taiwan, and NASA through the NEOO program.
Date of Conference: September 11-14, 2012
Track: Astronomy