{"id":54289,"date":"2016-12-19T09:11:49","date_gmt":"2016-12-19T19:11:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/?p=54289"},"modified":"2020-01-22T14:07:25","modified_gmt":"2020-01-23T00:07:25","slug":"largest-digital-sky-survey-released-by-pan-starrs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/2016\/12\/19\/largest-digital-sky-survey-released-by-pan-starrs\/","title":{"rendered":"Largest digital sky survey released by <abbr title=\"Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System\">Pan-STARRS<\/abbr>"},"content":{"rendered":"<span class=\"span-reading-time rt-reading-time\" style=\"display: block;\"><span class=\"rt-label rt-prefix\">Reading time: <\/span> <span class=\"rt-time\"> 3<\/span> <span class=\"rt-label rt-postfix\">minutes<\/span><\/span><div class=\"responsive-video-wrap\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"620\" height=\"349\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/xxmsi8r1yTg?showinfo=0\" title=\"Youtube video player\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\n<p>The Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (<abbr>Pan-STARRS<\/abbr>) project at the University of <span aria-label=\"Hawaii\">Â鶹´«Ã½<\/span> at M&#257;noa <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ifa.hawaii.edu\/\">Institute for Astronomy<\/a> is publicly releasing the world&#8217;s largest digital sky survey today, via the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.stsci.edu\/portal\/\">Space Telescope Science Institute<\/a> (<abbr>STScI<\/abbr>) in Baltimore, Maryland.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;The <a href=\"http:\/\/pswww.ifa.hawaii.edu\/pswww\/\"><abbr>Pan-STARRS<\/abbr>1 Surveys<\/a> allow anyone to access millions of images and use the database and catalogs containing precision measurements of billions of stars and galaxies,&rdquo; said <strong>Ken Chambers<\/strong>, director of the <a href=\"http:\/\/pswww.ifa.hawaii.edu\/pswww\/\">Pan-STARRS Observatories<\/a>. &ldquo;<abbr>Pan-STARRS<\/abbr> has made discoveries from Near Earth Objects and Kuiper Belt Objects in the Solar System to lonely planets between the stars; it has mapped the dust in three dimensions in our galaxy and found new streams of stars; and it has found new kinds of exploding stars and distant quasars in the early universe.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;With this release we anticipate that scientists&#8212;as well as students and even casual users&#8212;around the world will make many new discoveries about the universe from the wealth of data collected by <abbr>Pan-STARRS<\/abbr>,&rdquo; Chambers added.<\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/panstarrs.stsci.edu\">four years of data comprise 3 billion separate sources<\/a>, including stars, galaxies and various other objects. The immense collection contains 2 petabytes of data, which is equivalent to one billion selfies, or one hundred times the total content of Wikipedia.\u00a0<\/p>\n<h2>Four years of observation<\/h2>\n<p>The first <abbr>Pan-STARRS<\/abbr> observatory is a 1.8-meter telescope at the summit of Haleakal&#257;, on Maui. In May 2010, it embarked on a digital sky survey of the sky in visible and near infrared light. This was the first survey to observe the entire sky visible from <span aria-label=\"Hawaii\">Â鶹´«Ã½<\/span> multiple times in many colors of light, with the goal of finding moving, transient and variable objects, including asteroids that could potentially threaten the Earth. The survey took approximately four years to complete, and scanned the sky 12 times in each of five filters.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;Achieving the high quality of the <abbr>Pan-STARRS<\/abbr>1 measurements and maintaining it over such an enormous quantity of data was a unique computational challenge and the results are a tribute to the dedicated efforts of our small team of scientists at the <abbr title=\"University of Hawaii\">UH<\/abbr> <abbr title=\"Institute for Astronomy\">IfA<\/abbr> and our collaborators who worked to process and calibrate the extraordinary volume of raw image data,&rdquo; said <strong>Eugene Magnier<\/strong>, lead of the <abbr>Pan-STARRS<\/abbr> Image Processing team.<\/p>\n<p>This research program was undertaken by the <abbr title=\"Pan-STARRS Telescope No. 1\">PS1<\/abbr> Science Consortium&#8212;a collaboration among 10 research institutions in four countries with support from <abbr title=\"National Aeronautics and Space Administration\">NASA<\/abbr> and the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nsf.gov\/\">National Science Foundation<\/a> (NSF). Consortium observations for the sky survey, mapping everything visible from <span aria-label=\"Hawaii\">Â鶹´«Ã½<\/span>, were completed in April 2014. This data is now being released publicly.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;It&#8217;s great to see the <abbr>Pan-STARRS<\/abbr>1 data release supported by the National Science Foundation now made available to the general astronomical community,&rdquo; said Nigel Sharp, program director in <abbr>NSF<\/abbr>&#8217;s astronomical sciences division. &ldquo;I am impressed by the work the team invested to make the best-calibrated and best-characterized data set they could. I eagerly anticipate the science from mining these data.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<h2>Two stage roll-out<\/h2>\n<p>The roll-out is being done in two stages. Today&#8217;s release is the &ldquo;Static Sky,&rdquo; which is the average of each of those individual epochs. For every object, there&#8217;s an average value for its position, its brightness, and its colors. In 2017, the second set of data will be released, providing a catalog that gives the information and images for each individual epoch.<\/p>\n<p>The Space Telescope Science Institute provides the storage hardware, the computers that handle the database queries, and the user-friendly interfaces to access the data.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;The cooperation between <abbr title=\"Space Telescope Science Institute\">STScI<\/abbr> and the <abbr>Pan-STARRS<\/abbr> team at the University of <span aria-label=\"Hawaii\">Â鶹´«Ã½<\/span> has been essential to ensuring that this initial data release is successful,&rdquo; explained Marc Postman, head of the Community Missions office at <abbr>STScI<\/abbr>, and liaison between <abbr>STScI<\/abbr> and the <abbr>PS1<\/abbr> Consortium. &ldquo;<abbr>STScI<\/abbr> was a natural partner to host the <abbr>Pan-STARRS<\/abbr> public archive given its extensive experience serving astronomy data to the international community. In advance of the release of the <abbr>Pan-STARRS<\/abbr> data, <abbr>STScI<\/abbr> staff helped perform checks of data quality, helped write archive user documentation, tested and installed the local data storage and database query system, and designed, built and deployed the web-based user interfaces to the archive system.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>The survey data resides in the <a href=\"https:\/\/archive.stsci.edu\/\">Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes<\/a> (MAST), which serves as <abbr title=\"National Aeronautics and Space Administration\">NASA<\/abbr>&#8217;s repository for all of its optical and ultraviolet-light observations, some of which date to the early 1970s. It includes all of the observational data from such space astrophysics missions as Hubble, Kepler, <abbr title=\"Galaxy Evolution Explorer\">GALEX<\/abbr> and a wide variety of other telescopes, as well as several all-sky surveys. <abbr title=\"Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System\">Pan-STARRS<\/abbr> marks the nineteenth mission to be archived in <abbr>MAST<\/abbr>.<\/p>\n<p><em>&#8212;By Roy Gal<\/em><\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_54292\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-54292\" style=\"width: 630px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/manoa-ifa-sky-survey-2016.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"620\" height=\"278\" class=\"size-full wp-image-54292\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/manoa-ifa-sky-survey-2016.jpg 620w, https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/manoa-ifa-sky-survey-2016-260x117.jpg 260w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 620px) 100vw, 620px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-54292\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Compressed view of the entire visible sky. Credit: Danny Farrow, <abbr>Pan-STARRS<\/abbr>1 Science Consortium and Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The surveys allow access to millions of images and data on billions of stars and galaxies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":54295,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,12],"tags":[35,36,9,56],"class_list":["post-54289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research","category-video","tag-institute-for-astronomy","tag-pan-starrs","tag-uh-manoa","tag-video-2","entry","has-media"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/manoa-ifa-ps1-observatory-f.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54289"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54289\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":109977,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54289\/revisions\/109977"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}