The Pan-STARRS Sky Survey is the first substantial synoptic digital sky survey, ranging from a few to thousands of measurements of some 6 billion astronomical objects. I will review the Pan-STARRS System and highlights of the scientific results to date. These include discoveries of Near Earth Objects, Comets, Kuiper Belt Objects, ultracold brown dwarfs; the 3-dimensional distribution of dust in the Milky Way, new features in the stellar and dynamical structure of the Milky Way, new galaxies in the local group, eclispsing binaries in M31 (critical for the distance ladder); ultraluminous supernovae, SnIa supernova and their constraints on dark matter, dark energy and quintessence; black hole tidal disruption events, high redshift quasars, and large scale structure. I will conclude with a brief description of the current Pan-STARRS NEO Survey, its expected data products, and the potential for identifing the source of gravitational wave events detected by LIGO.
The Pan-STARRS1 Surveys have been made possible through contributions of the Institute for Astronomy of the University of Hawaii; the Pan-STARRS Project Office; the Max-Planck Society and its participating institutes: the Max Planck I nstitute for Astronomy, Heidelberg and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching; The Johns Hopkins University; Durham University; the University of Edinburgh; Queen's University Belfast; the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network Incorporated; the National Central University of Taiwan; the Space Telescope Science Institute; the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under Grant No. NNX08AR22G issued through the Planetary Science Division of the NASA Science Mission Directorate; the National Science Foundation under Grant No. AST-1238877; the University of Maryland; the Eotvos Lorand University; and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.