Over on New Scientist’s website, Rachel Courtland has done a nice piece about some big trouble for the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) project atop Mount Haleakala in Hawaii.

Pan-STARRS is an ambitious project to digitally survey the night sky. When it’s completed, four mirrors will scan the sky for killer asteroids, distant planets, and all sorts of stuff. The massive digital database it produces will also be able to provide insights into big cosmological questions, like the distribution of dark matter in the Universe. In many ways, it will compete with a much larger project known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). According to the Pan-STARRS website, it hopes to do “some” of LSST’s science before the larger telescope came online and at a quarter of the cost.

The two projects couldn’t be more different. The LSST is a giant 8.4 meter survey telescope planned for Cerro Pachón in Chile at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. It has been peer-reviewed and is being methodically developed through a public-private funding consortium.

By contrast, Pan-STARRS is funded through a budget earmark from Senator Dan Inouye (Democrat-Hawaii). For those unschooled in the ways of Washington, an earmark is essentially a giveaway by a member of congress to their constituency and in this case it means that the Air Force is required to provide the project with around US$10 million each year. While LSST hums and haws over its design, Pan-STAARS has been slapping together a 1.4-billion-pixel digital camera and optics for a prototype telescope. The astronomers involved use whatever they can find, including parts from E-Bay.

For the moment, it seems that the Pan-STAARS approach isn’t working—the telescope is taking images that are about half as sharp as they should be. The team has just begun taking their prototype apart in hopes of fixing the problem. According to Courtland’s article, the main problem seems to be with the joints holding up the telescope’s secondary mirror.

That doesn’t mean that Pan-STAARS won’t beat LSST in the end. The latest repairs should only take a few weeks, and the larger telescope is not expected to come online until 2017.

Image: Brett Simison