The Pan-STARRS Project is a collaboration between the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Maui High Performance Computing Center and Science Applications International Corporation.

By detecting differences from previous observations of the same areas of the sky, Pan-STARRS is discovering many new asteroids,[1] comets, variable stars, supernovae and other celestial objects.

[2] The first Pan-STARRS telescope (PS1) is located at the summit of Haleakalā on Maui, Hawaii, and went online on 6 December 2008 under the administration of the University of Hawaiʻi.

[10] Nick Kaiser, principal investigator of the Pan-STARRS project, summed it up, saying, "PS1 has been taking science-quality data for six months, but now we are doing it dusk-to-dawn every night.

"[citation needed] The PS1 images, however, remain slightly less sharp than initially planned, which significantly affects some scientific uses of the data.

Each image requires about 2 gigabytes of storage and exposure times will be 30 to 60 seconds (enough to record objects down to apparent magnitude 22), with an additional minute or so used for computer processing.

As of June 30, 2010, University of Hawaiʻi in Honolulu received an $8.4 million contract modification under the PanSTARRS multi-year program to develop and deploy a telescope data management system for the project.

[11] The very large field of view of the telescopes and the relatively short exposure times enable approximately 6000 square degrees of sky to be imaged every night.

Systematically surveying the entire sky on a continuous basis is an unprecedented project and is expected to produce a dramatically larger number of discoveries of various types of celestial objects.

Early versions of this software were immature, leaving a fill factor of 68% of the full field of view (which figure includes gaps between the detectors), but by March 2010 this had improved to 76%, a small reduction from the approximately 80% available.

Apart from dramatically adding to the number of known Solar System objects, Pan-STARRS will remove or mitigate the observational bias inherent in many current surveys.

WISE infrared images will permit an estimate of size for asteroids and trojan objects tracked over longer periods of time by Pan-STARRS.

In discovering numerous Cepheid variables and eclipsing binary stars, it will help determine distances to nearby galaxies with greater precision.

It is expected to discover many Type Ia supernovae in other galaxies, which are important in studying the effects of dark energy, and also optical afterglows of gamma ray bursts.

It is also expected that Pan-STARRS may discover many extrasolar planets by observing their transits across their parent stars, as well as gravitational microlensing events.

Also, by identifying stars with large parallax but very small proper motion for follow-up radial velocity measurements, Pan-STARRS may even be able to permit the detection of hypothetical Nemesis-type objects if these actually exist.