Poor vision for asteroid hunter telescope

New Scientist : The first of the asteroid-hunting Pan-STARRS telescopes will be taken apart today in an effort to solve problems with image quality.The 1.8-meter PS1 telescope is the first of a suite of instruments—the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System—designed to find asteroids and comets with orbits that could bring them close to Earth. Sited atop a volcano on the Hawaiian island of Maui, PS1 is the prototype for a planned four telescopes that will image the whole sky visible from Hawaii three times each month.To scan so much sky, PS1 boasts a 1.4-billion-pixel digital camera and specially designed software to process the terabytes of data collected by the telescope each night.But since the camera was installed in 2007, the telescope team has been struggling to get PS1’s image quality to its targeted level. “There have been problems that we just didn’t anticipate,” says Pan-STARRS principal investigator Nick Kaiser of the University of Hawaii at Manoa.