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July 03, 2007

Haleakala may soon be home to a range of new telescopes that will detect killer asteroids, discover new classes of objects and open up astronomical data to underfunded researchers around the world. But there’s a catch. A hierarchy of stakeholders in the project will be scanning, analyzing, and even altering the original data before the public ever sees it. And the United States Air Force sits right on the top of that totem pole
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PAN-STARRS (Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System) began as a brainchild of Congress to detect potentially hazardous objects in the Solar System. The details were developed  by the Institute for Astronomy (IFA) at the University of Hawaii in conjunction with the Air Force and a private consortium of institutes. It’s the stuff of big-budget Hollywood films such as Armageddon, in which Bruce Willis rockets out to space and blows up a giant asteroid that threatens to crash into Earth and destroy all life. The idea is to catalog and map near-Earth objects (NEOs), such as comets and asteroids, that could potentially collide with Earth and cause mass extinctions and general calamity. But because PAN-STARRS was not funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) or any other “public” agency, there are no requirements for when the data has to be shared with the public.

The Air Force will have first dibs to the data created by the PAN-STARRS telescopes. It will “clean it up” by removing any objects deemed important to the military and unimportant to scientists, such as satellites and weapons. When the U.S. military is done with it, a group of funding organizations known as the Science Consortium will have the right to skim the  cream off the scientific data, determining which is most relevant or eye-opening. After these two stages, the data will eventually trickle down to the public, who paid for the facility’s initial development.

“The consortium is in the process of developing protocols for data release to the public. Timing will vary within each of the 12 key science areas,” says Dr. Ken Chambers, a PS1 scientist. “Gamma ray burst data will likely be released quickly, probably within a few hours, because of their transient nature.  Other data could take a few months or a year.”

Concerned with the inaccessibility of PAN-STARRS, NSF has decided to fund a competing large sky survey, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), estimated at seven to eight years away from operation. In January 2007, Google joined forces with the LSST project to help organize and
implement the massive quantities of data it will generate.

A pattern of secrecy
Kyle Kajihiro, Director of an anti-military group based in Honolulu called the American Friends Service Committee, says the exclusiveness of the PAN-STARRS data mirrors the secrecy of the process responsible for hatching the sky  survey. According to Kajihiro, decisions regarding PAN-STARRS operations were “driven by congressional appropriations and were made in secret.”   

“The public only sees the results long after financial commitments are made,” he explains. 

The PAN-STARRS project was initially put forward by the University Affiliated Research Center (UARC) as a top priority project that the Navy would fund. UARC is a classified Navy research facility in which the Navy is the “client” and UH is the “provider”. Most UARC research is classified. UARC pulled out of PS, but the UH continued developing the project with funding from Congress and the help of the Air Force. In particular, Senator Daniel Inouye has brought $46.7 million of Congressional appropriations to the PAN-STARRS project since 2002.
This is  “part of a military pork barrel package, driven by opportunity, not need,” says Kajihiro.   “It leads to corruption, bloated bureaucracy and poor economic policy decisions. We are building our economy on this type of funding.”

The Air Force for their part insists that they are not trying to hide data from the public.  The Director of Public Relations for the Air Force Research Laboratory, Juventino Garcia, says the military is simply assisting astronomers by removing “noise” that could interfere with the data. “A satellite streaking through the sky corrupts the data astronomers are looking at,” explains Garcia. “The Air Force will remove this ‘noise’ because we have the processing techniques available from other programs. The data removed is very small and not all frames will contain this noise.”

But is this data-cleaning really necessary? Opponents of the project point out that  past large sky surveys saw the same “targets,” and the Air Force did not erase those. A lack of transparency, they say, can only lead to wild rumors regarding secret weapons, UFOs, and other military hijinks.

 Kajihiro for one, suspects ulterior motives. He says PAN-STARRS could assist the U.S. military in identifying and possibly waging war on competitors in space. This is “part of the broad U.S. military doctrine of full-spectrum dominance, including weapons in space and undersea; cyber warfare; and hi-tech warfare—frontiers that the U.S. wants and needs to dominate,” says Kajihiro, who adds that this agenda disregards the international community’s efforts to preserve space as a peaceful zone.


The PAN-STARRS plan
The existing PAN-STARRS facility on Haleakala is referred to as “PS1” because it will have only one sky camera. Not yet operational, it is run only by a skeleton crew, and key components of the sky camera are still in development.  PS1 represents the first phase of an ambitious project to scan the entire sky a few times each month over the course of a few years.

The full-scale PAN-STARRS project, called “PS4” because there will be four sky cameras instead of just one, is slated to replace the UH’s 2.2-meter telescope atop Mauna Kea.  Haleakala is still considered only the alternate site for PS4, but as growing opposition and legal battles plague the Mauna Kea Plan, Maui groups opposing the project are on full scale alert. 

At the same time, the formation of the Science Consortium in 2006 has brought the project’s broader scientific implications into clearer focus. In 2005, Congress assigned NASA the task of detecting 90 percent of NEOs with a size greater than 420 feet in diameter by the year 2020.  The PAN-STARRS program will aid this effort by detecting the majority of life-threatening objects as small as 900 feet.  But that is only one of its objectives.  IFA worked with 12 other organizations to form the Science Consortium, which is meant to bring in additional funding for management and operations of the project, opening up the door to a range of possibilities for project data. Groups involved include The Johns Hopkins University, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the National Central University, Taiwan.

Before the formation of the Science Consortium, people only knew the general, killer-asteroid-spotting
objective of PAN-STARRS. But the research potential for the telescopes is  much greater. The new facility will perform the most comprehensive sky survey of moving objects to date. Dr. Adam Burgasser, Assistant Professor of Physics at MIT says, “Assuming it comes together, PAN-STARRS will be one of the first big surveys to probe the time domain.  Other big surveys probed the sky, but did it with a single image. PS1 will revisit areas of the sky repeatedly so some of this time domain science will begin to emerge.  It will be like looking at a new wavelength of light or a new dimension of space.  We have no idea what we’re going to see, and we may discover whole new classes of objects.”

Dr. Chambers says the PAN-STARRS project will succeed at “pushing the limits of technology on three fronts:  computer science, detector science, and astronomical science.”  The challenge in computer science is to collect, transfer, store, and serve the huge quantities of data generated each night by the telescopes. The direction of astronomy is toward increasingly vast quantities of data, and computer science pushes astronomy as much as astronomy pulls computer science. On the detector front, The PS1 team  plans to build the world’s largest digital camera (at 1.4 billion gigapixels) on a chip about the size of a laptop computer.  It will be 100 times more powerful than the best consumer digital camera.

The amount of data that will come from the project could keep researchers around the world busy for years. When this information finally becomes public, the capital expense barrier will come way down for scientists at underfunded universities and in poor countries that can’t afford to buy into the project consortium now. Essentially anyone with a computer and internet connection will be able to get online and work with the data.   This will extend to researchers in India, China, and countries in Eastern Europe and Africa who typically have limited or no access to cutting-edge astronomy data.

Still, opponents of the plan point out that economic motives tend to compromise scientific integrity and distort scientific and educational goals.  If the main scientific purpose of PAN-STARRS is humanitarian, why does the project require military funding and Air Force censoring?  Moreover, a host of cultural and environmental concerns surround the project.


The Maui Opposition
AFSC opposes the militarization of the sacred mountains of Hawaii as do other groups, such as the Sierra Club, Friends of Haleakala, and Kilakila o Haleakala. If denied on Mauna Kea, the project would face opposition to three to-be-built structures on Haleakala as well.

Kiope Raymond, President of the non-profit board of directors for Kilakila o Haleakala, and a board member of Friends of Haleakala National Park (FHNP), says, “If the IFA were to respectfully adhere to the wishes of the native Hawaiian community, no telescopes would be built on the sacred summit of the mountain…
Unfortunately this is not the case.”

Lance Holter, President of the Sierra Club in Maui, adds that the construction process is “A source of antagonism with the community because  in the latest phase of construction IFA drilled deeper than before and moved rock out.”  If the IFA and government agencies involved truly want to benefit the public, he explains, then they need to learn to assimilate other points of view and cultural perspectives into their thinking.

Raymond says the IFA handled the development of PS1 in the same way it has done historically: according to its own agenda. In the early 1950s a scientist known as the “father of radio astronomy,” Grote Reber, worked at the Haleakala summit. The space where he worked is now marked by a circle of concrete. There has been no clean-up.

However, Raymond says that this is not just a Scientists vs. Hawaiians scenario. Both FHNP and Kilakila o Haleakala would like to seek compromise by everyone and would agree to a comprehensive master plan for the summit area that addresses the cumulative impacts of present and future planned activities before any more development takes place.

In a major victory for PS4 opponents on the Big Island, Judge Glenn S. Hara of the Third Circuit in January ruled that there has to be a master plan for the summit of Mauna Kea before any new development can occur. Judge Hara said, “The resource that needs to be conserved, protected and preserved is the summit area.”  It is not clear if this ruling will extend to Haleakala.

The summit area includes the telescope facilities and a U.S. National Park with nearly two million annual visitors. A comprehensive master plan for the area would aim to address interests public and private, commercial and environmental, scientific and cultural.

Genevive Bjorn