Telescope to deliver detailed scan of sky

Author: * Sokni Hvitaskald - 5 Posts on this thread out of 1,073 Posts sitewide.
Date: Jul 8, 2006 - 23:57

An array based on the Maui model will help find "killer asteroids"

By Helen Altonn
haltonn@starbulletin.com

A hunt for "killer asteroids" will begin from Haleakala, where a powerful telescope was recently dedicated.

The first telescope of its kind on Maui will be surveying about one-third of the sky every night.

"The amazing thing is the project got the first funding Sept. 23, 2002, and a little less than four years later, we've got a telescope up there," said Nicholas Kaiser, principal investigator of the $50 million project at the Hawaii Institute for Astronomy.

The first telescope, PS1, was dedicated June 30 in a ceremony on the summit of Haleakala shortly after it achieved "first light" with test images of stars.

PS1 is a prototype for a powerful array of four small telescopes known as the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System. Environmental and site studies are under way to determine if Pan-STARRS will be located on Haleakala or on Mauna Kea on the Big Island.

The PS1 telescope's dedication was called "a historic event" by Rolf Kudritzki, University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy director. He said Pan-STARRS "is the most important UH telescope project in 30 years."

"We don't expect to have any really exciting results until about September," Kaiser said. "What we have at the moment is enough equipment so we can test out the telescope and really start commissioning the system."

The telescope's 71-inch mirror is much smaller than the twin Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea, each nearly 400 inches. But the world's largest digital camera is being built for the PS1 at the Institute for Astronomy in Manoa, and by the end of the year, it will have a resolution of 1.4 billion pixels of light, Kaiser said.

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http://starbulletin.com/2006/07/08/news/story11.html