Pan-STARRS System Performance Documents
- efficiency_notes.pdf This document discussed many factors that impact the efficiency of Pan-STARRS. These include the impact of sky brightness, atmospheric seeing, finite pixel size, charge diffusion trailing losses, atmospheric refraction, read noise and telescope aberrations on the efficiency for faint point source detection. Filter design is discussed. Limits on astrometric precision (both from photon counting noise and from residual seeing fluctuations) are presented.
- filterdesign.pdf Detailed analysis of performance of broad band filters for detection of neutral color objects.
- poi_book.pdf The POI-book is somewhat out-dated, but discusses the philosophy behind the Pan-STARRS system design, as well as system performance issues.
- spie02_nk.pdf Nick Kaiser's presentation at the 2002 SPIE meeting. Contains discussion of distributed versus single aperture approach to wide field imaging.
- asteroiddetection.pdf Review of factors affecting efficiency of asteroid detection. H-magnitude system is reviewed, along with phase and distance effects. Angular velocities for asteroids as a function of sky location and magnitude are presented. Preliminary completeness estimates for NEO surey are given.
- collisionrate.pdf Detailed discussion of the definition of asteroid collision hazard and simulations performed to estimate completeness versus time for elimination of collision risk by current surveys, Pan-STARRS, and an hypothetical 8m DMT.
- neo_requirements.pdf Early discussion of requirements for asteroid hazard reduction program. Contains discussion of observing strategy (including filter choice, survey area, effect of high air-mass, exposure times, cadence etc.); image differencing; linkage algorithms; processing requirements. Also contains estimates of sizes of databases. Contains plots of distributions of sky plane velocities and accelerations for main belt and potentially hazardous asteroids.