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• Pan-STARRS
   marches across
   the sky in search
   of asteroids
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   objects in space
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Pan-STARRS marches across the sky in search of asteroids

	The dome of PS1, atop Mt. Haleakala’s 10,000 ft. summit
	We catch a glimpse of the telescope through the dome’s slit

While fantasies of asteroids wreaking havoc on earth are usually reserved for the domain of Hollywood, Nick Kaiser has made asteroid detection the stuff of everyday business.

An England native and educated at Cambridge, Kaiser made his way here eleven years ago to join the University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy. The institute’s vibrant community and Hawaii’s pristine viewing conditions led him here; England’s cloudy, he reminds we who spend our sunny days here.

One thing led to another, as he says, and today he finds himself head of an ambitious project that’s using some of the world’s most powerful telescopes – Pan-STARRS. Pan-STARRS is an acronym for panoramic survey telescope and rapid response system, and it’s the technology developed by Nick and a team of others to survey the entire available sky, of which about three-quarters is visible from Hawaii.

Pan-STARRS is designed to map out large areas of the sky – to the tune of about forty times the area of the full moon at a time – and to great sensitivity. Such a wide field of view and fine detection capability separates this technology from other telescopes, Nick says, which typically allow you to view a single object and not much else.

Pan-STARRS works by looking at a selected patch of sky for about thirty seconds, then downloads this image immediately to a computer, and moves onto the next patch, repeating the process. At this rate, about one-quarter of the sky can be surveyed each night.

These thirty-second snapshots are put together to create a kind of time-lapse movie of the entire sky, to the faintest levels. And when this movie is played, it becomes easy to detect anything that moves or changes, like asteroids.

Maui’s Mt. Haleakala is home to this endeavor, which is in its observational infancy. The project will eventually employ four telescopes, compared to its one today, and is proposed to be located atop Mauna Kea on the island of Hawaii. The one operational telescope today, PS1, is undergoing final adjustments. Once commissioned in the coming months, it will embark on a three-and-a-half year mission.

Nick and his team will be looking for objects 1 kilometer across, which would alter life as we know it if they come into contact with earth. Once these objects are documented, they will track those 300 meters across, which can inflict extensive local damage.

Sound like a scary science fiction movie?

Nick likens his work to going to the doctor for a preventative check-up. His prognosis- there’s a very small chance that something bad could happen in the next hundred years, so we’re okay.

While Pan-STARRS’ primary purpose is asteroid and other near object detection, Nick says the data collected will be instrumental in a great number of other efforts. He says there are currently 300 scientists signed up to do major projects, something he is very excited about.