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The Pan-STARRS1 Surveys

K. C. Chambers, E. A. Magnier, N. Metcalfe, H. A. Flewelling, M. E. Huber, C. Z. Waters, L. Denneau, P. W. Draper, D. Farrow, D. P. Finkbeiner, C. Holmberg, J. Koppenhoefer, P. A. Price, A. Rest, R. P. Saglia, E. F. Schlafly, S. J. Smartt, W. Sweeney, R. J. Wainscoat, W. S. Burgett, S. Chastel, T. Grav, J. N. Heasley, K. W. Hodapp, R. Jedicke, N. Kaiser, R. -P. Kudritzki, G. A. Luppino, R. H. Lupton, D. G. Monet, J. S. Morgan, P. M. Onaka, B. Shiao, C. W. Stubbs, J. L. Tonry, R. White, E. Bañados, E. F. Bell, R. Bender, E. J. Bernard, M. Boegner, F. Boffi, M. T. Botticella, A. Calamida, S. Casertano, W. -P. Chen, X. Chen, S. Cole, N. Deacon, C. Frenk, A. Fitzsimmons, S. Gezari, V. Gibbs, C. Goessl, T. Goggia, R. Gourgue, B. Goldman, P. Grant, E. K. Grebel, N. C. Hambly, G. Hasinger, A. F. Heavens, T. M. Heckman, R. Henderson, T. Henning, M. Holman, U. Hopp, W. -H. Ip, S. Isani, M. Jackson, C. D. Keyes, A. M. Koekemoer, R. Kotak, D. Le, D. Liska, K. S. Long, J. R. Lucey, M. Liu, N. F. Martin, G. Masci, B. McLean, E. Mindel, P. Misra, E. Morganson, D. N. A. Murphy, A. Obaika, G. Narayan, M. A. Nieto-Santisteban, P. Norberg, J. A. Peacock, E. A. Pier, M. Postman, N. Primak, C. Rae, A. Rai, A. Riess, A. Riffeser, H. W. Rix, S. Röser, R. Russel, L. Rutz, E. Schilbach, A. S. B. Schultz, D. Scolnic, L. Strolger, A. Szalay, S. Seitz, E. Small, K. W. Smith, D. R. Soderblom, P. Taylor, R. Thomson, A. N. Taylor, A. R. Thakar, J. Thiel, D. Thilker, D. Unger, Y. Urata, J. Valenti, J. Wagner, T. Walder, F. Walter, S. P. Watters, S. Werner, W. M. Wood-Vasey, R. Wyse

TL;DR

Pan-STARRS1 delivers a fully implemented wide-field imaging system with a comprehensive data-processing pipeline (IPP) and publishing framework (PSPS), enabling deep, multi-band, time-domain surveys over the northern sky. The paper details the system architecture, survey strategies, data products, and photometric/astrometric calibrations, establishing DR1 and DR2 public data releases and outlining future data products. It highlights substantial scientific impact across solar system inventories, Milky Way structure, extragalactic studies, and transient astrophysics, demonstrating Pan-STARRS1 as a foundational precursor for later large surveys and Gaia/LASST-era efforts.

Abstract

Pan-STARRS1 has carried out a set of distinct synoptic imaging sky surveys including the $3π$ Steradian Survey and the Medium Deep Survey in 5 bands ($grizy_{P1}$). The mean 5$σ$ point source limiting sensitivities in the stacked 3$π$ Steradian Survey in $grizy_{P1}$ are (23.3, 23.2, 23.1, 22.3, 21.4) respectively. The upper bound on the systematic uncertainty in the photometric calibration across the sky is 7-12 millimag depending on the bandpass. The systematic uncertainty of the astrometric calibration using the Gaia frame comes from a comparison of the results with Gaia: the standard deviation of the mean and median residuals ($ Δra, Δdec $) are (2.3, 1.7) milliarcsec, and (3.1, 4.8) milliarcsec respectively. The Pan-STARRS system and the design of the PS1 surveys are described and an overview of the resulting image and catalog data products and their basic characteristics are described together with a summary of important results. The images, reduced data products, and derived data products from the Pan-STARRS1 surveys are available to the community from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) at STScI.

The Pan-STARRS1 Surveys

TL;DR

Pan-STARRS1 delivers a fully implemented wide-field imaging system with a comprehensive data-processing pipeline (IPP) and publishing framework (PSPS), enabling deep, multi-band, time-domain surveys over the northern sky. The paper details the system architecture, survey strategies, data products, and photometric/astrometric calibrations, establishing DR1 and DR2 public data releases and outlining future data products. It highlights substantial scientific impact across solar system inventories, Milky Way structure, extragalactic studies, and transient astrophysics, demonstrating Pan-STARRS1 as a foundational precursor for later large surveys and Gaia/LASST-era efforts.

Abstract

Pan-STARRS1 has carried out a set of distinct synoptic imaging sky surveys including the Steradian Survey and the Medium Deep Survey in 5 bands (). The mean 5 point source limiting sensitivities in the stacked 3 Steradian Survey in are (23.3, 23.2, 23.1, 22.3, 21.4) respectively. The upper bound on the systematic uncertainty in the photometric calibration across the sky is 7-12 millimag depending on the bandpass. The systematic uncertainty of the astrometric calibration using the Gaia frame comes from a comparison of the results with Gaia: the standard deviation of the mean and median residuals () are (2.3, 1.7) milliarcsec, and (3.1, 4.8) milliarcsec respectively. The Pan-STARRS system and the design of the PS1 surveys are described and an overview of the resulting image and catalog data products and their basic characteristics are described together with a summary of important results. The images, reduced data products, and derived data products from the Pan-STARRS1 surveys are available to the community from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) at STScI.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 69 sections, 2 equations, 29 figures, 12 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. The Pan-STARRS System
  3. Background
  4. The Pan-STARRS Project
  5. The PS1 Science Consortium
  6. The PS1 Science Mission
  7. The STScI MAST Archive and Data Releases
  8. Flow of information in the Pan-STARRS System
  9. Site
  10. Telescope, optics, and control system
  11. GPC1 - the Gigapixel Camera #1
  12. Filter bandpasses and PS1 sensitivity
  13. IPP - Image Processing Pipeline
  14. Chip Stage
  15. Camera Stage
  16. ...and 54 more sections

Figures (29)

  • Figure 1: Flow of information through the Pan-STARRS System. The various subsystems are discussed in Section \ref{['sec:system']}.
  • Figure 2: The Pan-STARRS1 optical design 2008SPIE.7012E..1KM. The as-built design version is specified as NOADC-M-3.0 shown here. In the figure rays enter from left at the top of telescope where the spider legs that support the secondary introduce diffraction spikes in the images. There are three baffles, one supported by the secondary support structure, a middle cone baffle that is suspended by cables aligned with the secondary support spiders, and a baffle supported from within the central hole of the primary. The corrector lenses are labeled in order of passage as L1, L2, and L3 which is also the cryostat window. Between L2 and L3 are the filter mechanism and the shutter. The filter mechanism has 3 layers which can store 6 filters.
  • Figure 3: Gigapixel Camera 1 focal plane layout and mask. The non-functioning cells are blanked out in white.
  • Figure 4: This figure is reproduced from 2012ApJ...750...99T for ease of reference. The PS1 capture cross-section in m$^{2}$e$^{-1}$photon$^{-1}$ to produce a detected e$^{-1}$ for an incident photon for the six Pan-STARRS1 bandpasses, $grizy_{\rm P1}$ and $w_{\rm P1}$ for a standard airmass of 1.2.
  • Figure 5: Schematic of the image and analysis processing stages of the IPP (Magnier et al 2017b). The images are read from the GPC1 to buffer storage at the summit. The IPP polls this buffer and retrieves new images whenever they are created. During the night the raw images are retrieved, and are processed individually through the single image analysis. The nightly difference images for moving object or transient detection are created from a warp-stack image combination if the stack exists, or a warp-warp difference from a pair if there is no stack image. The post-processing stages work on the stacked images for the Static Sky Analysis and on the individual warp images for the Forced photometry.
  • ...and 24 more figures