Pan-STARRS will be composed of 4 individual telescopes of 1.8 meter aperture observing the same region of sky simultaneously. Each telescope will have a 3 degree field of view and be equipped with a CCD focal plane mosaic with 1 billion pixels. The spatial sampling of the sky will be about 0.3 arcseconds. In survey mode, i.e., searching for potential killer asteroids, Pan-STARRS will cover 6,000 deg2 per night. The whole available sky as seen from Hawaii will be observed 3 times during the dark time in each lunation.
With exposure times varying between 30 and 60 seconds, we expect Pan-STARRS to reach a limiting magnitude of 24. Our focal plane will employ Orthogonal Transfer CCDs (OTCCDs) that allow the shifting of charge along both rows and columns. This will allow us to use on-chip image motion compensation, i.e., the equivalent of "tip-tilt" image compensation but without any moving parts.