It takes two 1.4 gigapixel images every minute, all night, every night, looking for asteroids. It is optimized for this hunt, with a high sensitivity very wide field, and with a Schmidt Cassegrain construction which means that the images are crisp and clear, without any distortion, right to the edges of its wide field of view.

And - it is not operated by NASA. It is true that it is under the auspices of the Hawaii university, which is in Hawaii, which became the fiftieth state of the USA in 1959. But it is managed by the PS1 Science Consortium consisting of ten institutions from four countries.

So if you think there is a conspiracy hiding Nibiru - then all of those institutions would have to be in on it.

But not only that, also all amateur astronomers world wide with telescopes of ten inches or more. It's just totally silly and absurd.

Pan-STARRS is doing a great job of finding asteroids. We have already found ALL THE ASTEROIDS OF TEN KILOMETERS IN DIAMETER OR LARGER inside of Jupiter. So not even a ten kilometer asteroid could be hiding there, never mind a planet. Also, we've found 90% of the one kilometer asteroids, and Pan-STARRS finds a new one kilometer asteroid, on average, every month. They expect to reach 99% coverage of Near Earth Object (NEO) one kilometer asteroids by the 2020s.

Nowadays amateurs don't have a chance of finding one and they have given up trying. Never mind spotting a new planet by photographing the sun :). Instead they do the follow up observations, where they are very much needed. With thousands of asteroids to follow, the professional telescopes can't keep up.

With all the nearby big ones already found - if a big one was headed our way, one as big as the asteroid that ended the dinosaur era, we'd be likely to have a couple of decades warning before it got close to Earth. And with all of the largest Near Earth Objects (NEOs) found already, that only leaves comets, which makes it an estimated perhaps less than one in ten million chance that we get hit by one of those in the next century. I.e. 99.99999% certain that we don't get hit by anything as big as ten kilometers in the next century. Many blockbuster movie goers would guess it is perhaps a 50% chance, I'd imagine :).

Now the asteroid threat is significant. But with all the largest ones found and most of the next size down going to be found in the next decade, the ones we need to worry about now are the smaller ones. A 100 meter asteroid hitting Earth in the wrong place could be very bad news for an entire small country. Here is Brian May talking about the effect of a 100 meter asteroid if it hit London.



