Post by Chicago Astronomer - Astro Joe on Jul 7, 2006 12:12:47 GMT -6
New Hawaiian Telescope Dedicated
Honolulu HI (SPX) Jul 07, 2006
Astronomers dedicated the University of Hawai'i's newest telescope, called PS1, last Friday in a ceremony on the summit of Haleakala, the massive extinct caldera on the island of Mau'i. The telescope is a prototype for the larger Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System, or Pan-STARRS, telescope scheduled to start scanning the skies for "killer asteroids" in 2010.
The telescope's mirror is only 71 inches in diameter - much smaller than the twin Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea, whose mirrors are nearly 400 inches each.
The PS1 will be unique because it will be equipped with the world's largest digital camera, currently under construction at the UH Institute for Astronomy's Manoa headquarters. The camera will contain 1.4 billion pixels -about 300 times more than in a typical commercial digital camera.
Each night, PS1 will produce about 2,000 gigabytes of data, most of which will be sent by optical fiber to be analyzed at the Mau'i High Performance Computing Center in Kihe'i.
When the telescope becomes operational, the PS1 survey will survey the whole sky every few days to find celestial objects that change or move. In addition to discovering millions of asteroids, some of which might pose a danger to Earth, PS1 will collect data to be analyzed by Hawaii astronomers and an international consortium.
The data collected will help answer questions in areas of astronomy ranging from the solar system to the entire observable universe.